?Burp? from space brings news of new object

A FEW minutes after tea on Thursday, a huge cheer went up around the HPCA stadium here. Inzamam-ul Haq was walking out to bat and the cheer quickly became an impromptu rendition of Happy Birthday to you.

A strange and powerful burst of radio waves from near the centre of our galaxy may have come from a previously unknown type of space object, US astronomers reported on Wednesday.

HT Image

Other experts nicknamed the mysterious source a “burper” and said there would be a race to scan for similar radio bursts. “We hit the jackpot,” said Scott Hyman, a professor of physics at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who led the study.

“An image of the galactic centre, made by collecting radio waves of about 1 metre in wavelength, revealed multiple bursts from the source during a seven-hour period from September 30 to October 1, 2002 — five bursts in fact, and repeating at constant intervals.”

The burst came from the direction of the middle of the Milky Way, of which Earth is a part, and could have originated from as far away as 24,000 light-years or from as close as 300 light-years. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles. It cannot have come from a celestial object called pulsar, the researchers write in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

But the source could be a brown dwarf of a magnetar — an exotic star with a powerful magnetic field. They have named the presumed object GCRT J1745-3009. “It will lead to more observations,” Shri Kulkarni and Sterl Phinney of the California Institute of Technology wrote in a commentary.

Hyman and colleagues made the discovery by studying observations made by the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.