ASKAP telescope detects 20 fast radio bursts this year

[James Kerman]

A powerful new telescope in the West Australian outback, CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, has detected 20 Fast Radio Bursts in the last 12 months.  Previously only 34 have been spotted before, beginning with the Lorimer Burst in 2007 by astronomers trawling through old data from the Parkes Telescope.

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The haul, reported 10 October 2018 in the journal Nature, includes the brightest and closest of these mysterious flashes that have ever been seen. 
"A single pulse can contain anywhere from two months to 80 years' worth of energy from the sun," said study lead author Ryan Shannon, of Swinburne University.

The latest batch of extragalactic signals has come from halfway across the universe, said astronomer and co-author Keith Bannister of the CSIRO.
"That means for us to detect them, they have to be stupidly bright," Dr Bannister said.  What's more, he added, the discovery of more such signals could help astronomers unravel another major mystery
"We don't know where a lot of the matter in the universe is," said Dr Bannister.  "We really hope we can use fast radio bursts to find that missing gas.  By the process of passing through the gas, they tell us that it's there — where it is and where it isn't."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-10-11/askap-telescope-in-western-australia-bags-huge-haul-of-frbs/10357170

 

[KG3]

What a remarkable puzzle!  It seems like there are some interesting explanations, including:

" In 2010 there was a report of 16 similar pulses: clearly of terrestrial origin; detected by the Parkes radio telescope; and given the name perytons.[18] In 2015 perytons were shown to be generated when microwave oven doors were suddenly opened during a heating cycle, with emission generated by the magnetron." 

But the extraterrestrial sources are a mystery!  It must be difficult to pin down an exact location in the sky from only a few milliseconds of data. 

[James Kerman]

I do remember reading that one of the astronomers at Parkes used to drive around the area with radio detecting equipment to try and pin down the interference before they traced it to the microwave.  Fortunately the ASKAP is located in a remote area and the federal and state governments legislated the area (12,600 hectares) to be a "radio quiet zone". 

https://www.ska.gov.au/Observatory/Pages/RadioQuiet.aspx