Cosmic radio bursts point to cataclysmic origins

05 Jul 2013 Mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from billions of light years away have left the scientists who detected them speculating about their origins. The international research team, writing in the journal Science , rule out terrestrial sources for the four fast radio bursts and say their brightness and distance suggest they come from cosmological distances when the Universe was just half its current age. The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars or black holes. Study lead Dan Thornton, a PhD student at England's University of Manchester and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, said the findings pointed to some extreme events involving large amounts of mass or energy as the source of the radio bursts. He said: "A single burst of radio emission of unknown origin was detected outside our Galaxy about six years ago but no one was certain what it was or even if it was real, so we have spent the last four years searching for more of these explosive, short-duration radio bursts. This paper describes four more bursts, removing any doubt that they are real. The radio bursts last for just a few milliseconds and the furthest one that we detected was several billion light years away.