What happened
In 2007, astronomer Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University asked his student David Narkevic to go through archival data from a pulsar survey carried out with the Parkes radio telescope. In a recording from July 24, 2001, they found an unusually bright pulse lasting less than 5 milliseconds, coming from a direction about 3° from the Small Magellanic Cloud. The smearing of the signal over time indicated that it had traveled an enormous distance through intergalactic plasma – farther than from any source in the Milky Way. In 90 hours of additional observations, the burst did not repeat. The discovery, published in “Science,” was received with caution, and its credibility was undermined by the perytons discovered soon afterward. Today thousands of similar bursts are known.
Witnesses
No direct observers – the signal was found in archival data by Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic.
Explanations and hypotheses
The Lorimer burst launched a new field of astrophysics – the study of fast radio bursts (FRBs). Their sources are still not fully understood, but in 2020 a similar burst was recorded from the magnetar SGR 1935+2154 in our Galaxy, pointing to magnetars – highly magnetized neutron stars – as at least one of the sources. Hypotheses of an artificial origin for the bursts have no basis in the data.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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