Mysterious bright radio flashes that appear for only a brief
moment on the sky and do not repeat could be the final farewell greetings of a
massive star collapsing into a black hole, astronomers from Nijmegen and
Potsdam argue.
Radio telescopes have picked up some bright radio flashes
that appear for only a brief moment on the sky and do not repeat. Scientists
have since wondered what causes these unusual radio signals. An article in this
week’s issue of Science suggests that the source of the flashes lies deep in
the early cosmos, and that the short radio burst are extremely bright. However,
the question of which cosmic event could produce such a bright radio emission
in such a short time remained unanswered. The astrophysicists Heino Falcke from
Radboud University Nijmegen and Luciano Rezzolla from the Max Planck Institute
for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam provide a solution for the riddle. They
propose that the radio bursts could be the final farewell greetings of a
supramassive rotating neutron star collapsing into a black hole.