By Ron Cowen
Astronomers say that they have discovered a new class of star that emits a burst of radio waves for 2 to 30 milliseconds before falling silent for minutes to hours. Each of the 11 newfound objects ranks among the strongest known sources of radio waves in the universe.
Because the objects broadcast for only about a tenth of a second each day, they’re extraordinarily difficult to detect. The Milky Way may harbor several hundred thousand of these elusive stars, Andrew G. Lyne of the University of Manchester in England and his colleagues report in the Feb. 16 Nature.