Astronomers Trace ‘Bizarre’ Energy Burst Massive Gamma Ray Emissions Beyond Milky Way Stump Scientists

For a few seconds every day, the universe is filled with a burst of gamma radiation that is more powerful than all of the energy generated in a century by the billions of stars in the Milky Way.

And yet, since the bursts were first discovered 30 years ago, astronomers have been at a loss to explain their origin. Now, new satellites and radio telescopes are beginning to find answers - and more puzzles.

Dale A. Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced Tuesday that his group had located the afterglow of a gamma ray burst that occurred May 8, plotted its radio emissions and found them to be bizarre.

Speaking at the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Frail said the radio signal, instead of declining at a steady rate as expected, zoomed up and down in strength. A graph of the signal looks like a picket fence.

“This is a complete surprise,” he said. “The signal is coming in a really bizarre fashion.”

The source was nailed down at a point at least 7 billion light-years away, far beyond the Milky Way galaxy. The site is the same one pinpointed for the May 8 burst by a European satellite and then confirmed by visual sightings from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Palomar Observatory in California.

But the radio signals from the burst were different.

“We expected the burster to act at radio wavelengths much as it does at X-ray and visible wavelengths - rise in brightness, then slowly become weaker,” said Frail. Instead, the signal suddenly brightens, then drops to a steady state, he said.