What Created These Mystery Radio Waves From Another Galaxy?
by William Herkewitz
A single, gleaming flash of radio waves zooms toward us from halfway across the universe. Where it came from, nobody was sure, and it was gone in an instant.
The Lorimer burst, named after the astronomer who discovered it in a stack of half-a-decade old records, has stumped scientists for the last six years. But today a team of astronomers has announced that they’ve found four more flares just like it.
"You have to look at the sky for a very long time to find these," says Dan Thornton, the astrophysicist at the University of Manchester who discovered the new radio wave bursts. "The reason that we’re detecting them now is we’ve simply looked long enough." Thornton and his colleagues have just published a paper in the scientific journal Science saying that these strange radio wave bursts are an entirely new astronomic phenomenon.
"Some people actually suspected the Lorimer burst was an atmospheric event," and a fluke measurement, says Manjari Bagchi, an astrophysicist at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, in Bangalore, India, who has also searched for these radio wave flares but was not part of the study. "But this proves that these are all natural phenomenon," Bagchi says.
Each flash of energy lasts only a few milliseconds, and researchers still don’t know what causes them. "We think they’re probably caused an explosive event, because we haven’t seen them repeat," Thornton says. And pinpointing their exact origin is just about out of the question, given how rare they are and how big space is.
Read more: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/what-created-these-mystery-radio-waves-from-another-galaxy-15657576
= new reply since forum marked as read
...heard faintly was, "...and now you know the REST of the story!"
One theory is that they are already here, but as multidimensional beigns, they're not always visible to us.
