Undergraduate student of West Virginia University, David Narkevik, was re-analysing data from the Parkes Radio telescope in Australia when he came across a five-millisecond burst of energy so powerful that it “saturated” the equipment.

Initially dismissed by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) as man-made radio interference because the burst was so startlingly strong and bright, the explosion put out a huge amount of power (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years and appears to have originated at least one-and-a-half billion light-years (500 Mpc) away.

Professor Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Melbourne stated:

“Normally the kind of cosmic activity we’re looking for at this distance would be very faint but this was so bright that it saturated the equipment,”

Scientists having another look at the data are now convinced that the burst was in fact real and emanated from far enough away that any ordinary energy surge should have been very faint.

It is thought that the recording illustrated a catastrophic event such as two neutron stars colliding, or the final evaporation of a black hole. NASA astrophysicist Valerie Connaughton of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, isn’t sure that either of the two hypothesis will hold up, because no radio burst has ever been associated with either phenomenon to date. If this one can be linked, however, it would be a “huge deal,” she says.

With this astonishing find, researchers are now going back to review other archived data from the Parkes telescope, looking for other such anomalies. They also pointed to the construction of a new radio telescope in Australia by 2012 as a potential tool to find other such events.

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The discovery of the radio burst is similar to the discovery of gamma-ray bursts in the 1970s, when military satellites revealed flashes of gamma-rays appearing all over the sky. One kind—the so-called long-period bursts—was eventually identified as the explosion (supernova) of a massive star with the associated formation of a black hole, hence the assumption of this new burst’s origin; however, no radio burst was associated with that supernova.

Radio astronomer Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis says that whatever caused the signal,

“it’s bound to be exciting. [The source] is almost certainly a very high-energy phenomenon, [that is bound to] push us into exciting new realms of physics.”

A paper on the research has been published on the Science Express site.