Looks like a meager bulge light curve to me.
Posted on 03/02/2005 5:21:21 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A strange and powerful burst of radio waves from near the center of our galaxy may have come from a previously unknown type of space object, U.S. astronomers reported on Wednesday.
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 center, made by collecting radio waves of about 1 meter (3 feet) in wavelength, revealed multiple bursts from the source during a seven-hour period from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, 2002 -- five bursts in fact, and repeating at remarkably constant intervals."
The burst came from the direction of the middle of the Milky Way galaxy, 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 known as a 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 an extremely powerful magnetic field.
They have named the presumed object GCRT J1745-3009.
"GCRT J1745-3009 will cause a stampede of further observations," Shri Kulkarni and Sterl Phinney of the California Institute of Technology wrote in a commentary.
"But perhaps even more important is the possibility that the radio heavens contain other fast radio transients (which, in anticipation of a trove of discoveries, we nickname 'burpers')."
Hyman and colleagues made the discovery by studying observations made by the National Science Foundation (news - web sites)'s Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
the source could be a brown dwarf of a magnetar -- an exotic star with an extremely powerful magnetic field.
Hmmmm? "... a new heaven and a new earth" comes to mind.
plasmatics
Too much of my mom's curry comes to mind.
May 20, 1998
"Magnetar" discovery solves 19-year-old mystery
Dead stars have afterlife active with starquakes, bursts of gamma rays
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast20may98_1.htm
magnetar, a neutron star with a super-strong magnetic field a thousand trillion times stronger than Earth's.
LOL!
There was a picture called the 'Eye of God' making the rounds on FR. Thank you science for confirming what I already believe. I don't believe for a minute we are here by 'mistake'.
We need to deploy a new Gas-X-ray telescope to check this out...
Bush's fault.
Too much Tex-Mex food?
It's the projectile vomiting you have to worry about.
Looks like a meager bulge light curve to me.
I don't believe we are here by mistake either.
I don't remember seeing the picture the "Eye of GOD" - do you know where I might be able to find it ..??
Thanks! Isn't it awesome??
plasmatics...
I, I,...ay ay ay I KNEW that's where you were going,...didn't we see them at CB's, Baby Let's Eat Out Tonight eventual suicide in the woods of Connecticut, tsk,tsk
Great picture. What exactly is it?
Explanation: Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is the closest example of a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 650 light-years away towards the constellation of Aquarius and spans about 2.5 light-years. The above picture is a composite of newly released images from the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope and wide-angle images from the Mosaic Camera on the WIYN 0.9-m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots of unknown origin.
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