There was a a result published recently on CNET and in Nature magazine of a case of an enigmatic radio signal coming from outside the Milky Way (see http://www.cnet.com/news/space-radio-signal-solves-the-mystery-of-the-missing-matter/ ).
These radio signals have the attributes of being short-lived, or ‘fast.’ They are discovered as non repeating bursts that last only about 1/1000 of a second (unlike pulsars which show bursts that repeat ever 1/1000 of a second). They are also very bright so that they can be seen across cosmological distances.
There have not been a lot of detections of fast radio bursts. This phenomenon is sufficiently new and enigmatic that as soon as one is made, other telescopes quickly move to that exact same part of the sky to see what it was that made that strange burst. To date, no one has been able to isolate the burst with an actual object in space.
What is different about this new burst reported in the latest issue of Nature is that we now we have a pretty good idea of where the burst is, or at least of the galaxy from which the burst likely arose.
Here is how it happened. This discovery was made at the massive Parkes radio Telescope in Australia. Within two hours of the detection of the fast radio burst, the Parkes telescope and the neighboring Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) each detected the radio signal. Although the burst lasted much less than a second, these two telescopes recorded an object in the same location of the sky and watched it take a full 6 days to fade away completely.
So the excitement in this case is owing to the fact that we caught this radio burst in the act of bursting, or at least of fading, for the first time. So, we should now know what it is, right? Well, the identification of the source of the radio burst is not nearly solved. The best guess is that these fast radio bursts may be caused by a colliding pair of neutron stars!
