FAST, the World's Largest Radio Telescope, Zooms in on a Furious Cosmic Source (scientificamerican.com) 18
China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope has detected more than 1,600 fast radio bursts from a single enigmatic system. From a report: Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are one of the greatest mysteries of our universe. Coming from deep space, these outbursts can flash and fade in a matter of milliseconds, yet in each instance can release as much energy as the sun does in a year. They pop up all across the sky multiple times a day, but most appear to be one-off events and are thus hard to catch. First discovered in 2007, FRBs have challenged and tantalized scientists seeking to uncover their obscure origins and to use them as unique tools for probing the depths of intergalactic space. Now, using the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, an international team has reported the largest set of FRB events ever detected in history.
According to their paper published in Nature today, between August and October 2019 the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in southwestern China recorded a total of 1,652 such brief and bright outbursts from a single repeating FRB source in a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. Besides dramatically boosting the total number of known FRB events, the observations also revealed a very wide range of brightnesses among the recorded events, offering new clues about the astrophysical nature of their mysterious source. "The study is very thorough, with a level of details and sensitivity we've never had before," says astrophysicist Emily Petroff from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and McGill University in Canada, who is not involved in the research. "Such in-depth analyses of individual sources will be a top priority in FRB research in the near future."
According to their paper published in Nature today, between August and October 2019 the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in southwestern China recorded a total of 1,652 such brief and bright outbursts from a single repeating FRB source in a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. Besides dramatically boosting the total number of known FRB events, the observations also revealed a very wide range of brightnesses among the recorded events, offering new clues about the astrophysical nature of their mysterious source. "The study is very thorough, with a level of details and sensitivity we've never had before," says astrophysicist Emily Petroff from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and McGill University in Canada, who is not involved in the research. "Such in-depth analyses of individual sources will be a top priority in FRB research in the near future."
Ohh a Science Post, Awesome. :) (Score:2)
Space children. (Score:3)
That's just Trelane [fandom.com] having a temper tantrum.
Are they arranged in groups corresponding to prime (Score:2)
Do they encode plans for how to build a machine for going to heaven?
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps it is GOD asking for a starship.
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telesc (Score:5, Interesting)
They left "radio" out of the acronym. They could just as well have included it and left out "spherical."
groan (Score:3)
FAST ... furious...
et tu Scientific American?
Re: (Score:2)
You do have an aptly chosen user name.
Penis envy, perhaps? With Arecibo collapsed, China now had the only functioning large radio telescope in the world, and you just can't resist insulting it.
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no, they have the only functioning full-dish monolithic radio telescope larger than 100 m. Note you have to get pretty specific to get to a point where you can declare "only".
Several movable dishes of up to 100 m exist. The Soviet RATAN-600 is monolithic and larger than 100 m, but only the edge of the circle is set up as a reflector.
Most large-scale radio telescopy is done with arrays these days, with far larger effective diameters than FAST to achieve higher resolution.
Monolithic large dishes are a niche i
Re: (Score:2)
It's also "FAST" in the sense of having a high F/ ratio. Another in-joke. Don't worry if it goes over your head - you weren't in the target audience.
I'd hope there are other puns and word-games in the Chinese name.
Does that fry all life in the whole galaxy? (Score:2)
This looks like the kind of mass extinction event which we know has happened on Earth from time to time, but on a much larger scale.
Re: (Score:2)
I want some aliens (Score:2)
How to get interest in "insert your weird new astronomical observation here":
Speculate that it might be aliens...
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Read The Friendly Paper (Score:2)
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Firstly, the title suggests something interesting (which TFS and the Sci-Am article seem to glide over : "A bimodal burst energy distribution of a repeating fast radio burst source".
So, a source with two processes going on producing two dissimilar types of FRB? Or something in the environment influencing either the generation of the FRBs, or their transmission, or their beaming and pointing? That's likely to be informative.
Someone up-thread asked for an "aliens" explanation. I don't have an