Mysterious object a real cosmic burper
A strange and powerful burst of radio waves may come from a new type of space object astronomers are nicknaming a "burper".
The discovery of this mysterious source of radio waves coming from near the center of our galaxy has prompted other experts to predict a race to scan for similar radio bursts.
"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 30 September to 1 October 2002: five bursts in fact, and repeating at remarkably constant intervals."
The burst came from the direction of the middle of the Milky Way 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 10 trillion kilometres.
It cannot have come from a pulsar, the researchers write, but the source could be a brown dwarf or a magnetar, an exotic star with an extremely powerful magnetic field.
Hyman and colleagues made the discovery by studying observations made by the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
They named the presumed object GCRT J1745-3009.
"GCRT J1745-3009 will cause a stampede of further observations," Professor Shri Kulkarni and Professor Sterl Phinney of the California Institute of Technology write 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')."