Telescope spots 20 new fast radio bursts
With the help of Western Australia's CSIRO radio telescope array,
astronomers have nearly doubled the number of documented fast radio
bursts, or FRBs.
Fast radio bursts are unique high-energy radio pulses lasting just a few milliseconds.
The first FRB was identified in 2007 from archival data collected by the
Parkes radio dish in Australia in 2001. In the following decade, 30
more fast radio bursts have been discovered by massive radio telescopes.
Over the past year, scientists identified 20 more FRBs, including the
closest and brightest yet observed. Astronomers described the new fast
radio bursts this week in the journal Nature Communications.
"We've also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side
of the universe rather than from our own galactic neighborhood," Ryan
Shannon, an astronomer from Swinburne University of Technology, said in a
news release.
Astronomers credit CSIRO's radio telescope technology, the Australia
Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, with the increased rate of
FRB discovery.
"The telescope has a whopping field of view of 30 square degrees, 100
times larger than the full moon," CSIRO engineer Keith Bannister said.
"And, by using the telescope's dish antennas in a radical way, with each
pointing at a different part of the sky, we observed 240 square degrees
all at once -- about a thousand times the area of the full moon."
Though scientists have struggled to pinpoint the origins of FRBs,
scientists are getting better at tracking the signals. One survey
successfully traced a fast radio burst to an elliptical galaxy 6 billion
light-years away.
The latest survey offers additional proof that most FRBs originate from outside the Milky Way.
As FRBs pass through molecular clouds on the way towards telescope
lenses on Earth, their wavelengths are refracted. The spectral lines
spread out, causing the bursts different frequency bands to slow down.
By measuring the staggered arrival of these signals, scientists can
estimate how far the bursts traveled.
"Because we've 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 -- which is a really exciting discovery," said Jean-Pierre
Macquart, researcher at the Curtin University.
Scientists still aren't certain what causes fast radio bursts, though
some cosmologists think the phenomenon is triggered by collisions
between relativistic objects.
Astronomers hope CSIRO will soon be able to track the origin of fast
radio bursts with unprecedented precision, allowing scientists to narrow
down possible causes.
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