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: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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between capturing a bullet with a 24fps and capturing a bullet with a slow-mo camera is the slow-mo camera costs more to replace.
I, for one, am not made of money, and I'll stick to shooting at 24fps cameras.

wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

6EQUJ5

News?

[tringstad]

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

They still don't.

Where's the fucking news?

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

[Quixote]

Glad you asked.

E = mc^2 ; so m = E/c^2 .
Plug in 10^33 for E, and 3x10^8 for c.
You get m = 11111111111111111 Kg.
Assume each book in LoC weighs on average 2Kg to simplify things.
At last count the LoC had about 20M books.
Dividing 11111111111111111 by (20,000,000 * 2), we get 277777777.
In other words, this was equivalent to 277 million libraries of Congress.
// E&OE

Re:The answer:

[liquidsin]

would it come off as rude if you told God to "go bless Yourself"?