Mining for the Ephemeral

摘要

Observed at radio wavelengths, the sky has revealed in recent years that it plays host to a zoo of variable and transient sources that pulse, flicker, burst, and burp. In the most recent manifestation of such ephemeral phenomena, Lorimer et al. (1) report on page 777 of this issue the discovery of a single radio burst so intense that it overloaded the detector of the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.