Parkes radio telescope tagged posts

The intensity of FRB 150807 at different radio frequencies or colors — red corresponds to lower frequencies and blue to higher frequencies. The x-axis is time. The fine structure in the burst is the scintillation or twinkling–the rays interfere constructively and destructively differently at different frequencies. This pattern provides insights into the turbulence in plasma towards the burst. Credit: Courtesy of V. Ravi/Caltech

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are mysterious flashes of radio waves originating outside our Milky Way galaxy. A team of scientists has now observed the most luminous FRB to date, called FRB 150807...

The infrared image on the left shows the field of view of the Parkes radio telescope with the area where the signal came from marked in cyan. On the right are successive zoom-ins on that area. At the bottom right is the Subaru optical image of the FRB galaxy, with the superimposed elliptical regions showing the location of the fading 6-day afterglow seen with ATCA. Credit: © D. Kaplan (UWM), E. F. Keane (SKAO)

An international research team including Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany used a radio and optical telescopes to identify the precise location of a fast radio burst (FRB) in a distant galaxy, allowing them to conduct a unique census of the Universe’s matter content.They confirmed current cosmological models of the distribution of matter in the Universe.

On A...

An annotated artist’s impression showing radio waves traveling from the new galaxies, then passing through the Milky Way and arriving at the Parkes radio telescope on Earth (not to scale). Credit: ICRAR

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor. Despite being just 250 million light years from Earth, the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Using CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists were able to see through the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space.

The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way ...