Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers

Astronomers studying archival data from an Australian radio telescope have discovered a powerful, short-lived burst of radio waves that they say indicates an entirely new type of astronomical phenomenon. 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. The startling discovery came as WVU undergraduate student David Narkevic re-analyzed data from observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud made by the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power - equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.