Mysteries of Space: Epic 'Cosmic Radio Burst' Finally Seen In Real Time





http://bit.ly/1zfNXza Dahboo7 On Zeekly: http://bit.ly/1AVK44S A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping to narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them. Figuring out what these fast radio bursts – sometimes called blitzars – are or where they come from could help answer some of the biggest cosmological questions. Blitzars last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as the sun does in a million years, all seemingly in a tight band of radio-frequency waves. Their source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years away, says Emily Petroff of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. A top contender is the collapse of an oversized neutron star that should have given way to a black hole long ago, but was spinning so fast that relativity made it seem lighter. But other possibilities include a flare from a magnetar, a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. A total of nine blitzars have been reported since the first was discovered in 2007, but all of them were found weeks or years after the actual event by sifting through old data. http://bit.ly/1AEsj6g

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