Cosmic radio bursts point to cataclysmic origins

Mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from billions of light years away have left the scientists who detected them speculating about their origins.

The international research team, writing in the journal Science, rule out terrestrial sources for the four fast radio bursts and say their brightness and distance suggest they come from cosmological distances when the Universe was just half its current age.

The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars or black holes.