THE brightest pulse of radiation ever seen has come from a pulsar nearly 12,000 light years away. Lasting less than 15 billionths of a second, the burst was recorded by a massive radio telescope at Tidbinbilla in Australia. Although the star was discovered decades ago, it is only now that telescopes have become sensitive enough to record such a fleeting phenomenon.
At the point where the pulse was emitted “the electromagnetic field strengths would be capable of totally vaporising and ionising all known materials, shredding them into hot plasma”, says Wayne Cannon of York University in Toronto, Canada, though…
