FRB170107 tagged posts

This is the ASKAP telescope in Western Australia. Credit: CSIRO

A CSIRO telescope in W. Australia has found its first ‘fast radio burst’ from space after less than 4 days of searching. The discovery came so quickly that the telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) near Geraldton in Western Australia, looks set to become a world champion in this fiercely competitive area of astronomy. The new fast radio burst finding was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

‘Fast radio bursts’ or FRBs are short, sharp spikes of radio waves lasting a few milliseconds. They appear to come from powerful events billions of light-years away but their cause is still a mystery. The first was discovered in 2007 and only 2 dozen have been found since...