How's this for an undergraduate project: A student at West Virginia University has uncovered an oversight in six-year-old radio telescope data that researchers believe could open up whole new fields of study in astrophysics.

David Narkevik, an undergraduate at West Virginia University, was re-analysing data from the Parkes telescope in Australia when he came across a five-millisecond burst of energy so powerful that it "saturated" the equipment. Researchers had previously dismissed it as a man-made phenomenon, an accident to be ignored, according to Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

But another look at the data has convinced scientists that in fact the burst was real, emanating from a point some 1.5 billion light years away, far enough away that any ordinary energy surge should have been very faint.

Now scientists think they may have recorded a catastrophic event such as two neutron stars colliding, or the final evaporation of a black hole.