New Weird Radio Source of Awesome

A lot of science boils down to someone, often a student, looking at some data, and someone says something that can be translated to, “Oh that’s weird,” and then a bunch of folks get involved, and a paper is published. A few years later, it starts to be well understood, and if the original researchers are lucky, they may get some cool awards for their one-two punch of being lucky enough to look in the right place or data set and to recognize something worth recognizing is in front of them.

Yesterday, a breaking news story beautifully followed this script. Honors student Tyrone O’Doherty wrote some data reduction routines to look for transient phenomena that come and go in the sky. This kind of software is pretty common for optical and infrared telescopes that search out supernovae and other events, but O’Doherty was using radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array, which looks at the sky in longer wavelengths than earlier telescopes have generally explored. This test platform for technology that will be used in the future Square Kilometer Array is still being pushed to see what it is capable of, and this is where an honors student and some new software come into play.

Tile 107, or “the Outlier” as it is known, is one of 256 tiles of the MWA located 1.5km from the core of the telescope. The MWA is a precursor instrument to the SKA. Photographed by Pete Wheeler, ICRAR

While doing a look-through of archival data, O’Doherty spotted a breathtakingly bright source or at least a source bright in the not well-explored color of radio light Murchison observes…