Mysterious Radio Burst Seen in Real Time

A mysterious "fast radio burst" was seen for the first time in real time by astronomers, a strange phenomenon whose origins have yet to be discovered, new research finds.

This eruption is defined as an extremely short, sharp flash of radio waves from an unknown source in the Universe, lasting only a few milliseconds. It was first documented in 2007 when astronomers went through archival data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, and since then it has seen six more such bursts. In addition, just last summer the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico discovered a split-second burst of radio waves, deepening the mystery of these deep space events.

And now, after setting out to find these radio bursts right as they happen, and not after the fact, a team of astronomers in Australia has successfully seen the first "live" burst with the Parkes telescope, its source supposedly located up to 5.5 billion light-years from Earth.

Scientists are still puzzled as to what exactly is causing these radio bursts, with theories ranging from evaporating black holes and mergers of neutron stars, to flares from magnetars - a type of neutron star with extremely powerful magnetic fields.

Despite the fact that these scientists managed to capture the radio wave burst while it was happening, its origins still elude them. However, that doesn't mean the discovery was a waste of time.

"We found out what it wasn't," Daniele Malesani, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

"The burst could have hurled out as much energy in a few milliseconds as the Sun does in an entire day. But the fact that we did not see light in other wavelengths eliminates a number of astronomical phenomena that are associated with violent events such as gamma-ray bursts from exploding stars and supernovae, which were otherwise candidates for the burst."

"The theories are now," she added, "that the radio wave burst might be linked to a very compact type of object - such as neutron stars or black holes and the bursts could be connected to collisions or 'star quakes'. Now we know more about what we should be looking for."

The results were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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