Small Business

Cosmic ray burst excites star buffs

A BURST of intense radiation a mere five milliseconds long has astronomers racing to their telescopes to determine if the mysterious cosmic event is a one-off or a new celestial phenomenon.

If the short-lived hyper-blast is as common as its US and Australian discoverers believe, it would represent a new source of radio waves that scientists could use to probe the distant galaxy.

Team member Matthew Bailes of Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology said: "There was an interesting class of cosmic activity, now known as gamma-ray bursts, revealed by the military in the 1970s. This mysterious occurrence might be something similar and could trigger a new area of cosmic study."

The discovery, reported early today in the online edition of Science, came when Professor Bailes and his colleagues were studying archival data collected in 2001 by the CSIRO's 64m Parkes radio telescope in NSW.

David Narkevic, a student at West Virginia University in Morgantown, spotted the burst in observations of the Small Magellanic Clouds, a pair of little galaxies prominent in the southern sky.

Team leader Duncan Lorimer, of the WVU and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, said: "This burst appears to have originated from the distant universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole."

After Mr Narkevic's discovery, the group contacted astronomer John Reynolds, the officer in charge of the CSIRO's Parkes Observatory.

"Their first response was, 'Ooo, can we observe this event again?'," Dr Reynolds recalled.

"They spent several days staring in the same direction but it didn't deign to reappear."

According to Assistant Professor Lorimer's group, the newfound phenomenon promises exciting science, especially when the next generation of very wide field-of-view telescopes such as the Australian SKA Pathfinder come online in the next few years.

"We'd expect to see a few bursts over the whole sky every day," Dr Reynolds said.

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