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: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.

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