How a mystery pulse helped weigh the Universe »

This burst has enabled us to conduct a unique census of the Universe's matter content in a new, independent and direct way and in a sense weigh the Universe. Scientists have pinpointed the source of a rare burst of radio waves from the heavens for the first time, identifying the culprit as an elliptical galaxy six billion light years away. The fleeting pulse also gave the international scientific team a glimpse of the make-up of the space the radio waves passed through on their journey, enabling them to calculate the Universe's body-mass index. "This pulse has travelled six billion light years to reach us and it only lasted a millisecond," said team member Manisha Caleb, PhD student at The Australian National University (ANU). "We've spent almost a decade trying to identify an origin for these elusive fast radio bursts. It's exciting to finally pinpoint a distant galaxy as the source," said Ms Caleb, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lead researcher Dr Evan Keane from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation conceived the study while working for the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at Swinburne University of Technology.