Thursday, 30. June 2016
Topic: SCIENCE - on June 30, 2016 at 11:15:00 AM CEST
Why ultra-powerful radio bursts are the most perplexing mystery in astronomy
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.”
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