
Cosmic radio burst finally seen in real time - cfontes
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26813-epic-cosmic-radio-burst-finally-seen-in-real-time.html#.VLza1qy9LCQ
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Cogito
I couldn't work this out from the article, might try digging around for it -

How did they know to point the telescope in the right direction?

If these bursts last for a significant amount of time do they have an alert
system set up monitoring for the event and then kick the telescope into gear?
They were able to get other telescopes to observe the area of the burst, but
it seems like they were too late, as they didn't even observe an after glow
from the burst. This suggests the bursts do not last for any reasonably long
amount of time.

Maybe they were just lucky? Normally the telescope's use is highly contested
for so it would be quite serendipitous if they happened to observe the burst
by chance.

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antognini
The bursts are extremely short (roughly a millisecond long), so there's not
enough time to point a telescope in the right direction. So far the
discoveries of these fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been serendipitous. Based
on the observed number of FRBs it's estimated that there are about ~2500 per
day that would be detectable by a telescope pointed in the right direction.

Here's a paper that goes into that estimate in much more detail:
[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.447.2852K](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.447.2852K)

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hartror
All done by Australian scientists while the government slashes their funding
left and right. We're going to be left with wheat, sheep and a bunch of holes
in the ground once the mining is finished.

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classicsnoot
Ok. I'll say it. I know very little of physics and maths. What features need
to be observed to rule out the possibility of intelligent design in terms of
the pulse?

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te_platt
I think your question is a bit backwards. What features would a pulse need to
indicate it was caused with intelligent intent? These pulses have plausible
(although exotic) explanations as natural events. There are people who have
looked at the bursts as possible signals (see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_int...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#Gamma-
ray_bursts) ) but the more plausible explanation is natural.

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classicsnoot
Excellent point. Thank you.

So i guess that leads me to the next level of questioning. What known cosmic
events need to be ruled out before intelligence behind the event gets on the
list of probabilities, say somewhere in the top 20?

