Signals from Heaven
Running across the Internet like wildfire, the fact that astronomers have found a mysterious radio burst hidden in the 2001 radio survey of the Small Magellanic, a nearby dwarf galaxy, is causing a lot of excitement in the scientific fields. Yet a recent article, “Astronomers Find Mysterious Radio Burstz,” by Dave Mosher in Space.com, reports that the radio burst is not thought to have come from the galaxy itself, because the emission’s offset location and wide dispersion has made it “completely inconsistent” with that of a nearby object.
Occurring about 3 billion light-years away from Earth, scientists feel that the signal could possibly be of a cosmic car crash of two neutron stars or the death of a black hole. Detailed in the September 27, 2007 issue of the online journal “Science Express,” it refers to the fact that radio-emitting pulsars send out similar emissions, but normally will repeat them every few hours.
This was the reason that the event remained hidden in the data, as no one was looking for single emission bursts. The astronomers had originally created the 480-hour-long emission observation over a period of 20 days to look for the repetitive radio emissions from the pulsars—considered to be fast-rotating neutron stars.
Considered to be a “ peek-a-boo star”, the rotating neutron stars have the ability to appear and disappear several times daily, acting like faulty cosmic lighthouses. They are known for spinning and emitting brief and bright flashes of radio waves that have a reputation for being the brightest objects in the sky, then in another moment they disappear completely from sight.
With this one radio signal the only one observed so far, it seems to be impossible to say regarding its implications. Other radio data that are being researched are several years old, with few radio observatories being able to detect these short single bursts. With the bursts occurring approximately at a rate of a couple hundred each day, according to Lorimer, the whole-sky surveys that use “next-generation radio observatories” are being required to detect most of them.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
