Parkes Radio Telescope Receives Unexplained Fast Radio Burst From Space

Since 2007, astronomers have been trying to find an explanation for Fast Radio Bursts. These are brief bursts of radio waves which last only a few milliseconds. There have been seven records of this event but has not been observed live as it is happening.

A team of astronomers in Australia, using the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, developed a technique on how to capture this phenomenon and have succeeded in observing a live fast radio burst from space.

By coordinating with the Swift space telescope and the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, they pinpoint the source of the radio waves to be around 5.5 billion light years from Earth. It was also noted that the energy emitted by these millisecond long fast radio bursts is equal to the energy the Sun gives out in a single day.

Although they have no explanation on what these events are and what causes them, they theorize that it might be connected to neutron stars or black holes.

The results of their findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ESO Installs Supercomputer At ALMA Facility - The ALMA Correlator

The ALMA correlator

One of the fastest supercomuter, the ALMA correlator, has been fully installed and tested at the ALMA astronomical facility in Chile. With over 134 million processors and performance up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, the ALMA correlator is one of the fastest supercomputers in existence today.

The Atacama Large Millimeter /submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a space telescope located on the Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. It has 66 high-precision antennas, spread over distances of up to 16 kilometres. The facility is partially operational and will be fully completed by March 2013.

ALMA studies light emitted by some of the coldest objects in space. Since these objects emit light that is hardly detected, the ALMA looks at wavelengths between infrared light and radio waves. This is known as millimeter and submillimeter radiation. The telescope can detect light emitted by objects that are a few degrees above absolute zero.

The space telescope can help astronomers study the chemical and physical conditions in molecular clouds where stars are produced. These clouds are made up of dense gas and dust which are dark and obscured in visible light, much like clouds in the sky are. By detecting the light emitted in near infrared, ALMA can detect and collect data from these objects.

With the installation of the ALMA correlator, it will increase the sensitivity and image quality of its observation of outer space.

MIT News: Extremely Precise Radio Waves Using Negative Refraction Through Metamaterial Lens

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In many respects, metamaterials are supernatural. These manmade materials, with their intricately designed structures, bend electromagnetic waves in ways that are impossible for materials found in nature. Scientists are investigating metamaterials for their potential to engineer invisibility cloaks — materials that refract light to hide an object in plain sight — and “super lenses,” which focus light beyond the range of optical microscopes to image objects at nanoscale detail.