Australian astrophysicist’s $250,000 prize for field-changing discovery a ‘nice surprise’

Fast radio bursts identified by Prof Matthew Bailes and his team allow scientists to count number of atoms in the universe

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When Prof Matthew Bailes and his collaborators discovered a mysterious flash from a galaxy far, far away, he thought it was too good to be true".

It was 2007, and the scientists had come across an absurdly, insanely bright burst of radio waves" that had hit the Murriyang telescope at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory. The source, they figured, had to be a trillion times brighter than anything in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

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