Australian researchers using a CSIRO radio telescope in Western Australia have nearly doubled the known number of \u2018fast radio bursts\u2019\u2014 powerful flashes of radio waves from deep space.<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s discoveries include the closest and brightest fast radio bursts ever detected.<\/p>\n
Their findings were reported today in the journal Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n Fast radio bursts come from all over the sky and last for just milliseconds.<\/p>\n Scientists don\u2019t know what causes them but it must involve incredible energy\u2014equivalent to the amount released by the Sun in 80 years.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the number detected worldwide since they were discovered in 2007,\u201d said lead author Dr Ryan Shannon, from Swinburne University of Technology and the OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing the new technology of the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), we\u2019ve also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the Universe rather than from our own galactic neighbourhood.\u201d<\/p>\n Co-author Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart, from the Â鶹ֱ²¥ node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said bursts travel for billions of years and occasionally pass through clouds of gas.<\/p>\n \u201cEach time this happens, the different wavelengths that make up a burst are slowed by different amounts,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cEventually, the burst reaches Earth with its spread of wavelengths arriving at the telescope at slightly different times, like swimmers at a finish line.<\/p>\n \u201cTiming the arrival of the different wavelengths tells us how much material the burst has travelled through on its journey.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd because we\u2019ve shown that fast radio bursts come from far away, we can use them to detect all the missing matter located in the space between galaxies\u2014which is a really exciting discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n CSIRO\u2019s Dr Keith Bannister, who engineered the systems that detected the bursts, said ASKAP\u2019s phenomenal discovery rate is down to two things.<\/p>\n \u201cThe telescope has a whopping field of view of 30 square degrees, 100 times larger than the full Moon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd, by using the telescope\u2019s dish antennas in a radical way, with each pointing at a different part of the sky, we observed 240 square degrees all at once\u2014about a thousand times the area of the full Moon.<\/p>\n \u201cASKAP is astoundingly good for this work.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Shannon said we now know that fast radio bursts originate from about halfway across the Universe but we still don\u2019t know what causes them or which galaxies they come from.<\/p>\n The team\u2019s next challenge is to pinpoint the locations of bursts on the sky.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll be able to localise the bursts to better than a thousandth of a degree,\u201d Dr Shannon said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s about the width of a human hair seen ten metres away, and good enough to tie each burst to a particular galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n ASKAP is located at CSIRO\u2019s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, and is a precursor for the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.<\/p>\n The SKA could observe large numbers of fast radio bursts, giving astronomers a way to study the early Universe in detail.<\/p>\n The researchers and their institutions acknowledge the Wajarri Yamaji as the traditional owners of the MRO site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Australian researchers using a CSIRO radio telescope in Western Australia have nearly doubled the known number of \u2018fast radio bursts\u2019\u2014 powerful flashes of radio waves from deep space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4307,"featured_media":11255,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-19099","media-release","type-media-release","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/ASKAP_image6-1000x500.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Lucien","last_name":"Wilkinson","display_name":"Lucien 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