Radio burst from space mystifies astronomers WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of
radio waves said on Thursday they had never seen anything like
it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding
stars or dying black holes. They were searching for pulsars -- a
type of rotating compacted neutron star that sends out rhythmic
pulses of radiation -- when they spotted the giant radio signal.
It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come
from about 3 billion light-years away -- a light-year being the
distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.
"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," said Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia
University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Writing
in the journal Science, Lorimer and colleagues said they were
looking at old scans done