Radio waves from mystery source 5.5 bln light years away detected

A short, sharp flash of radio waves from a mysterious source up to 5.5 billion light years from Earth has been detected by CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia, local media reported on Tuesday.

In Melbourne, Swinburne University of Technology PhD student Emily Petroff "saw" the burst live - a first for astronomers.

Lasting only milliseconds, the first such radio burst was discovered in 2007 by astronomers combing old Parkes data archives for unrelated objects.

Six more bursts, apparently from outside the galaxy, have now been found with the Parkes telescope, in New South Wales, and a seventh with the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

Astronomers worldwide have been vying to explain the phenomenon.

"These bursts were generally discovered weeks, months or even more than a decade after they happened," Petroff said.

"We are the first to catch one in real time."

Confident that she would spot a "live" burst, Petroff had an international team of astronomers poised to make rapid follow-up observations, at wavelengths from radio to X-ray.

After the Parkes telescope saw the burst go off, the team swung into action on twelve telescopes around the world - in Australia, California, the Canary Islands, Chile, Germany, Hawaii, and India - as well as space based telescopes.

"We can rule out some ideas because no counterparts were seen in the optical, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray," CSIRO's Head of Astrophysics Dr Simon Johnston said.

"However, the neat idea that we are seeing a neutron star imploding into a black hole remains a possibility."

The 64-meter wide Parkes radio telescope in the central west of New South Wales claimed a place in history in July 1969 when it received television transmissions of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon.

One of the big unknowns of fast radio bursts is their distance. The characteristics of the radio signal - how it is "smeared out" in frequency from traveling through space - indicate that the source of the new burst was up to 5.5 billion light-years away.

"This means it could have given off as much energy in a few milliseconds as the sun does in a day," Petroff said.

She said identifying the origin of the fast radio bursts is now only a matter of time. "We've set the trap. Now we just have to wait for another burst to fall into it."