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

Re:Due diligence

[Anonymous Coward]

The above poster is correct. If you hear a burst of static on the radio, you might just as easily suspect the radio has a loose wire as you would suspect a distant source of interference.

However, if you pick up Beethoven's 5th Symphony, the odds of it being the loose wire making and breaking contact in exactly the right pattern are incredibly low...to the point you'd be insane if your top theory wasn't a distant transmitter broadcasting the symphony.

That's a little extreme of an analogy, but in this case there is also an order to the noise that highly suggests a real signal. Of course, there's orderly forms of interference, too, but most of those can be eliminated by comparing them with the signal.

I don't understand the comment on the rate. If they've only observed one, they can't make any guesses about the rate. The fact that we saw one looking at only a small portion of the sky suggests the rate is reasonably high, but we don't know how much dumb chance was involved.

As for what it is, it sounds like they may have ruled out this idea, but I was wondering if it might actually be a much more distant gamma-ray burst that's been red-shifted all the way to radio wavelengths.

Re:Due diligence

[NeutronCowboy]

I'm inclined to agree. There are very few violent events in Astrophysics that last exactly 5 ms. Even if it's true that the cosmos is vast, and that it is not very likely that someone else was looking at the same exact patch (more like fraction of a pinhead) in the sky at the same exact time, I believe something else should have picked up something. A pure radio radio signal that completely saturates equipment for exactly 5ms? I expect neutrino showers, x-ray waves, visible light - anything, something - to go along with, precede or follow it. Events of that magnitude are messy, and they leave other traces behind.

There are two possibilities here:
- Someone got too excited with their data processing software. Some of that stuff was written in the 70s and is held together with spit, duct tape and undergrad students who have never before seen a Fortran77 program, and probably never will again. I don't trust weird stuff that only shows up after heavy duty data processing.
- Someone picked up a not-so-local radio signal. The atmosphere can do weird things to radio waves.

Or some aliens were messing around with their cell phones again. In any case, I'll file this under "Postprocessing is a bitch".