Yesterday on the personal page of the director of the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputers at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) on Facebook, a message appeared that the MOST radio telescope, which is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, recorded the first fast radio burst.
The burst was discovered by Bayles' postdoc, Manisha Caleb, who has been using the telescope for less than a month. At the moment, scientists have information about less than 20 such phenomena, the first of which was described by astrophysicist Lorimer in 2007, although the burst itself was recorded in 2001.
The nature of the origin of the bursts has not yet been clarified, and scientists joke that the number of theories exceeds the number of bursts known to science. It is assumed that the sources of signals can be collisions of neutron stars, their collapse into a black hole, as well as single surges of energy from supernovae before the explosion.
The power of the recorded bursts is enormous and comparable to the amount of energy released by the Sun for 10 thousand years. The short duration of the signals indicates that the source does not exceed hundreds of kilometers.
The radio telescope with which the burst was recorded is a complex of 7744 antennas, united in two 800-meter branches oriented to the East-West. After a comprehensive modernization that took five years, it only recently resumed operations.
The main tasks of the telescope are to identify previously unknown pulsars and to detect new radio bursts.