A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin

Abstract

Pulsar surveys offer one of the few opportunities to monitor even a small fraction (~0.00001) of the radio sky for impulsive burst-like events with millisecond durations. In analysis of archival survey data, we have discovered a 30-Jy dispersed burst of duration <5 ms located three degrees from the Small Magellanic Cloud. The burst properties argue against a physical association with our Galaxy or the Small Magellanic Cloud. Current models for the free electron content in the Universe imply a distance to the burst of <1 Gpc No further bursts are seen in 90-hr of additional observations, implying that it was a singular event such as a supernova or coalescence of relativistic objects. Hundreds of similar events could occur every day and act as insightful cosmological probes.

18 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by Science. Published electronically via Science Express on September 27, 2007

References in corpus (4)

• On the Rates of Gamma Ray Bursts and Type Ib/c Supernovae
• Discovery of 14 radio pulsars in a survey of the Magellanic Clouds
• Discovery of Five Recycled Pulsars in a High Galactic Latitude Survey
• On the Detectability of Prompt Coherent GRB Radio Emission

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• Non-thermal transient sources from rotating black holes
• Upper Limits on Pulsed Radio Emission from the 6.85 s X-ray Pulsar XTE J0103-728 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Transient Astrophysical Pulses and Quantum Gravity
• Searching for Transient Pulses with the ETA Radio Telescope
• Transient Radio Neutron Stars