Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers Record Mystery Radio Signals From 5.5 Billion Light Years Away
sarahnaomi writes For the first time ever, astronomers have captured an enormous radio wave burst in real time, bringing us one step closer to understanding their origins. These fleeting eruptions, called blitzars or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are truly bizarre cosmic phenomena. In the span of a millisecond, they emit as much radiation as the Sun does over a million years. But unlike other super-luminous events that span multiple wavelengths—gamma ray bursts or supernovae, for example—blitzars emit all that energy in a tiny band of the radio light spectrum. Adding to the mystery is the rarity of blitzar sightings. Since these bursts were first discovered in 2007 with Australia's Parkes Telescope, ten have been identified, the latest of which was the first to be imaged in real time.
don't be a hater; it's a solid "B" effort from the parent-post. You can argue it down to a "C", but that's as far as you'll get. Lulling the reader into submission (your complaint about it taking too long) is an actual STRATEGY. Are you familiar with how certain readers can gloss over typos? That's what our beheaderaswp is using as a trapping action. Now you can also argue that the barb "never going to give" isn't worth burying with the lead-up, but while humor bursts from the unexpected there is also a joy in the familiar. I'm sorry if this attempt isn't up to your standards, but it hits the standard.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This time the data was analyzed in real time and triggered an alarm so other radio-telescopes could look at it in other wavelengths, etc.
As it (or at least the interesting bit) lasted "the span of a millisecond", those other radio-telescope operators must have acted pretty quick.
You're not trying hard enough then. :-) One of the benefits of excellent karma is that you can bring out the flamethrower to crisp up some fool on occasion without too many consequences.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Yes, redshift affects all wavelengths equally. However, at the distance they cited, the cosmological red shift is only a factor of 3 in wavelength, which is just enough to shift visible into near-IR, while a shift from gamma to radio spectrum would need a factor of a billion. Current theories give the cosmic microwave background a redshift of around 1100, so we would not expect to see any cosmological red shifts larger than that for light, because the universe was opaque before the even that created the CMB.
Also, in these specific cases, radio interacts with the plasma between Earth and the source, and causes the energy to disperse and spread out as different frequencies travel at slightly different speeds (e.g. a whistler wave). This effect is effectively not existent with IR and higher energy light going through the space between galaxies, but does give an idea how far the light traveled based on how much the different frequencies spreed out and what we know of densities between galaxies.
In principle you could still get that much red shift from something falling into a black hole or something moving very fast, but there would be some more subtle issues with that.