WVU Physics Team discovers New Astronomical Phenomenon; Findings to be published in Science

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. Sept. 27, 2007: West Virginia University physics professors, and an undergraduate student under their guidance, recently discovered a new type of astronomical phenomenon.

Drs. Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin, assistant professors of physics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, and David Narkevic, a senior physics and political science student from Philippi, W.Va., discovered a powerful, short-lived burst of radio waves.

The findings of this study will be published in the September 27 edition of the online journal Science Express

"This burst appears to have originated from the distant Universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole," said Dr. Lorimer, who also serves as assistant astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

David Narkevic was re-analyzing archived data to find new pulsars that had burst sporadically, as opposed to the usual type of these neutron stars which pulsate periodically. The team looked at observations from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) recorded by the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in Australia and surprisingly found the burst outside of the SMC in the distant Universe. The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light years from the Milky Way Galaxy.

Narkevic explained that the discovery involved a bit of luck because the survey included observations of the sky surrounding the clouds.

The burst of radio waves, considered a significant finding by astronomical standards, lasted less than five milliseconds. The signal was spread out with higher frequencies arriving at the telescope before the lower frequencies. This effect, called dispersion, is caused by the signal passing through ionized gas in interstellar and intergalactic space.

The amount of dispersion in this newly-discovered burst indicates that it likely originated about three billion light-years from Earth.

"We're actively looking for more of these powerful, short bursts in other archival pulsar surveys, and hope to resolve the mystery of their origin," said Dr. McLaughlin. "In addition, if we can associate these events with galaxies of known distance, the radio dispersion we measure can be used as a powerful new way to determine the amount of material in intergalactic space.”

According to their results, the team predicts that hundreds of similar events will occur each day outside the Milky Way Galaxy. The team has not yet found the origin of the phenomenon, but they speculate a couple of causes. One idea is that it may be part of the energy released when a pair of super-dense neutron stars collide and merge. The other theory suggests that the burst of energy is the last gasp from an evaporating black hole.

“We are primarily a program for researching pulsars, but this discovery potentially opens up a whole new area of study here at WVU,” Dr. Lorimer continued. “The discovery parallels the story of gamma-ray bursts, which became a new field of astronomy and occupied the research of many scientists for years trying to identify their characteristics. This mysterious occurrence could trigger a new area of cosmic study that we're involved in from the beginning.”

The WVU pulsar research program began in May 2006 when Dr. Lorimer and Dr. McLaughlin were jointly appointed by WVU and the NRAO, which manages the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.

The research team who discovered this phenomenon is led by WVU and NRAO’s Duncan Lorimer and consists of Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia, Maura McLaughlin of WVU and NRAO, David Narkevic of WVU, and Fronefield Crawford of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation and is operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The Parkes radio telescope is part of the Australia Telescope, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility.

The findings are available on the NRAO website at http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/brightburst. For more information, please contact Dr. Duncan Lorimer at Duncan.Lorimer@mail.wvu.edu or Dr. Maura McLaughlin at Maura.McLaughlin@mail.wvu.edu.

W-V-U