Astronomers Detect First Radio Bursts Originating From Galaxies Beyond the Milky Way

Posted on July 9, 2013

Astronomers, including a team member from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have detected the first radio bursts known to originate from galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. The sources of the light bursts are unknown. The astronomers say in a JPL release that cataclysmic events, such as merging or exploding stars, are likely the triggers for these radio bursts. The discovery comes from an international team that used the Parkes Observatory in Australia. The Parkes telescope is pictured above.

JPL defines a radio burst as a "quick surge of light from a point on the sky, made up of longer wavelengths in the radio portion of the light spectrum." A single radio burst was detected about six years ago, but researchers were unclear about whether it came from within or beyond our galaxy. The researchers say the new radio-burst detections -- four in total -- are from billions of light-years away. They are described in the July 4 issue of Science.

Sarah Burke Spolaor of JPL says, "Short radio bursts are really tricky to identify. Our team had to search 11 months of data covering a large sky area to find them."

A Scientific American story about the radio bursts quotes Shrinivas Kulkarni, a Caltech astrophysicist, who says the discovery of fast radio bursts - if confirmed at another observatory - would be a "monumental discovery, comparable to that of cosmological gamma-ray bursts and even pulsars."

SPACE