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

Due diligence

[KingSkippus]

I heard this story on NPR yesterday. I'm inclined to believe that it was...

Absolutely nothing.

It happened one time, six years ago, for less than five milliseconds, and no one else in the world can corroborate that it happened. To me, it sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.

Now, having said that, I think it's probably worthwhile to see if it happens again. As the article says, "The astronomers estimate on the basis of their results that hundreds of similar events should occur over the sky each day." If that is the case, then get to looking, and maybe I'll change my mind once they have more evidence.

Until then, though, let's not get so caught up in the coolness of the possibility of something we've never seen before that we don't do due diligence and make good science.

Re:News?

[Vellmont]

So, something happened 6 years ago, and nobody knew what it was.


No, something happened 3 billion years ago. An instrument recorded it six years ago. Someone re-analyzed the data recently, and discovered something they couldn't explain. They published a paper yesterday.

Where's the fucking news?

The "news" is that there's likely something very big going on we don't understand. It's kind of sad that you and others only think it's news once we understand what's going on. Science isn't just the end product you read about in textbooks. It's a process by which we understand the universe. This is part of that process, and if this isn't just radio interference, it's extremely interesting.