Why ultra-powerful radio bursts are the most perplexing mystery in astronomy

Nature ^ | 28 Jun, 2016 | Elizabeth Gibney

[MtnClimber]

No astronomer had ever seen anything like it. No theorist had predicted it. Yet there it was — a 5-millisecond radio burst that had arrived on 24 August 2001 from an unknown source seemingly billions of light years away.

“It was so bright, we couldn't just dismiss it,” says Duncan Lorimer, who co-discovered the signal1 in 2007 while working on archived data from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. “But we didn't really know what to do with it.”

Such fleeting radio bursts usually came from pulsars — furiously rotating neutron stars whose radiation sweeps by Earth with the regularity of a lighthouse beam. But Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, saw this object erupt only once, and with more power than any known pulsar.

He began to realize the significance of the discovery1 only after carefully going over the data with his former adviser, Matthew Bailes, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. If the source was really as far away as it seemed, it had released the energy of 500 million Suns in just a few milliseconds. “We became convinced it was something quite remarkable,” he says.

But when no more bursts appeared, initial excitement turned to doubt........

Whatever these objects are, recent observations suggest that they are common, with one flashing in the sky as often as every 10 seconds2. Yet they still defy explanation. Theorists have proposed sources such as evaporating black holes, colliding neutron stars and enormous magnetic eruptions. But even the best model fails to account for all the observations, says Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who describes the situation as “a lot of swirling confusion”.

[Zeneta]

So why does your fellow Freeper, Walter loyyywhatever feel the need to advance retarded Conspiracies ?

I know you know him and his work.

[mrsmith]

Loved the part about opening the door to the microwave oven LOL!
THAT is SO ‘sciencey’!

[thoughtomator]

Sorry, you’re mistaken there. Not familiar with him at all.

[spokeshave]

Ha...just a death star doing low power range finding calibration.

[The KG9 Kid]

FreeRepublic has for almost twenty years been an Elvis Costello-free zone.

Thanks in advance for your future compliance.

[SunkenCiv]

Very, very interesting article with lots of background information.

don't you mean, background radiation? ;')

Thanks MtnClimber!

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