Cosmic Radio Bursts

Since their discovery in 2007, cosmic radio bursts or “blitzars” have been a source of fascination to scientists around the world. The nine blitzars that have been studied in the years since their discovery have all been plucked from historical data.

Then, in January 2015, scientists announced that they identified a blitzar in real time. This means that whatever event caused the radio burst to happen was happening at the time that the scientists caught it.

It is unknown what causes these radio bursts, and experts have guessed that it might occur due to collapsing neutron stars or flares. The bursts have a length of one millisecond and, during this miniscule amount of time, they create the same amount of energy that the Sun would create over the course of one million years.

Emily Petroff, a researcher in Australia, stated that these blitzars occur at a distance of more than five billion light-years away from Earth, and the real time blitzar was noticed near the Aquarius constellation. She went on to say that she and her team will continue looking out for blitzars so as to try and gather some information and, hopefully, one day get behind the mystery of their origin.