London, Sept 28 : A radio burst that originated from beyond the Milky Way galaxy has befuddled astronomers.

Initial suspects include the merger of two dense stellar corpses called neutron stars and the complete evaporation of a black hole.

David Narkevic, an undergraduate student at West Virginia University in Morgantown, US, discovered the burst while searching through archived data taken in 2001 by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. He was looking for periodic signals from pulsars – rotating neutron stars – within our galaxy.

Washington, Sept 28 : Early Polynesians sailed thousands of miles for exploration and trade, analysis of early stone woodworking tools by a team of Australian researchers from the University of Queensland has revealed.

They say the study confirms traditional tales of vast ocean voyages and hints that a trading network existed between Hawaii and Tahiti as early as a thousand years ago.

Munich, Sept 28 : The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) Interferometer has helped astronomers discover a reservoir of dust trapped in a disc that surrounds an elderly star.

Scientists say the discovery provides additional clues about the shaping of planetary nebulae.

In the last phases of their life, stars such as our Sun evolve from a red giant, which would engulf the orbit of Mars to a white dwarf, an object that is barely larger than the Earth.

Washington, Sept 28 : Pennsylvania State University researchers have sequenced the DNA of 10 woolly mammoths that died 50,000 years ago, using a technique that could revolutionize genetic testing of extinct creatures.

In their study, ‘Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing of Mitochondria from Ancient Hair Shafts’, the scientists describe how the hair shafts of extinct animals can provide an ideal source of ancient DNA.

Washington, Sept 28 : Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, according to new study by a University of Southern California geologist.

Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before the rise in atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, Lowell Stott said in his study published online Sept 27 in Science Express.

Washington, Sept 28 : A new NASA funded research has pushed back the timeline for presence of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere by 50-100 million years before the Great Oxidation Event.

The event happened between 2.3 and 2.4 billion years ago, when many scientists think atmospheric oxygen increased significantly from the existing very low levels.

As part of their study, the scientists analysed a kilometre-long drill core from Western Australia, representing the time just before the major rise of atmospheric oxygen.