Powerful Blast Confuses Astronomers

eldavojohn writes "Astronomers are still speculating as to what could have caused an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago when it completely saturated their recording equipment. From the article: 'The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"

Comments

wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

6EQUJ5

Re:wow!

[pintpusher]

Wow! this is so not off-topic. wake up mods. try google.

here, I'll make it easy for you.

http://www.bigear.org/6equj5.htm

Re:ST reference

[XanC]

Praxis is their key energy production facility...

Re:Due diligence

[MichaelSmith]

To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane

TFA:

The signal was spread out, with higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before the lower frequencies. This effect, called dispersion, is caused by the signal passing through ionized gas in interstellar and intergalactic space. The amount of this dispersion, the astronomers said, indicates that the signal likely originated about three billion light-years from Earth.

So its not just a burst of noise. It has characteristics which say something about where it came from.

Time machines at last!

[QuickFox]

an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago You know that research into time machines is finally making progress when you get to read combinations of past and future tense like in this report about an event that is to be detected six years ago.

Confused; instead of donkeys per forthnite etc

[viking80]

(10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"

This is basically
1. 1 sun-month (power of the sun 4x10^26W for a month), or
2. 0.5% of a supernova

Re:Confused; instead of donkeys per forthnite etc

[MillionthMonkey]

How much energy do supernovae release in EM, compared with the event mentioned in TFA?

About 1% is EM (rest is neutrinos). Of that 1%, about 1% of that is in the visible spectrum. From a NOVA episode I think I remembered watching a few years ago.

Beams can occur naturally

[yariv]

If the object releasing the energy is rotating. This happens in pulsars, for example, and should happen when a massive rotating star collapses into a black hole, and in astrometric binary stars (when only one partner is actually a star, the other is a dead star), with an accretion disk.

Z-Machine

[bdkraem]

Makes the Z-machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine look like nothin.

Only on /.

[XanC]

...would a comment like that get modded "informative"!

Re:Ah, the logic of self-delusion.

[largesnike]

Your fantasy owuld be funny were it not just part the cause of so much mayhem and misery in this world I'm getting pretty tired of athiest sanctimoniousness.

Its as if when we all become athiests we'll have nothing to fight about, and we'll all live in a science-driven paradise where everyone will be rationalists

I believe Stalin was an athiest - he managed to kill 30 odd million without the need of religion, and another athiest, Pol Pot, cleaned out most of his country without religion as well.