The new telescope at the Green Bank Observatory will improve the location of Fast Radio Bursts

In an effort to unravel the mysteries of Fast Radio Bursts, a new telescope will take West Virginia University engineers one step closer to an explanation.

A new telescope is planned to be built thanks to a $ 1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation awarded to Kevin Bandura, assistant professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. at the Green Bank Observatory to locate the positions of FRBs in distant galaxies, allowing the possibility of finally discovering the nature of these enigmatic objects.

FRBs are among the brightest sources ever seen in the sky, but their origin remains a mystery to scientists. The intense flashes of energy only flare up for a millisecond and then disappear. Although they can only be seen for a brief moment, radio waves have traveled for billions of years through an ionized cosmic structure to be visible in the sky.

“Currently, most FRB positions are so inaccurate that astronomers don’t even know which galaxy they come from,” Bandura said. “The new telescope, Outrigger, will solve the problem by determining the particular galaxy, and will go further by locating the source in a specific region within the galaxy.”

The new Outrigger telescope will work in conjunction with the Canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment, or CHIME telescope, located half a continent away in British Columbia, to triangulate the positions of FRBs.

“The CHIME telescope will do the detection, but the data will be saved from both telescopes, so we can use very long basic interferometry techniques to really pinpoint where they come from,” Bandura said.

The CHIME telescope consists of four cylindrical reflectors, 256 dual-polarized antennas for data collection and an F-motor and an X-motor for data processing. To search for FRB, CHIME continuously scans 1024 separate points in the sky. The new Outrigger telescope will have only one cylinder but will monitor the same sky area as the original CHIME telescope.

“From this, we will be able to understand a lot of what is happening between us and the FRB,” Bandura said. “So if we can actually locate where it is and figure out where it’s coming from, we can use the information from the survey to figure out what’s between us and the source.”

The development of this program will open the door for the subsequent construction of additional stabilizers, allowing for even sharper localization of radio bursts and pave the way for the future construction of larger low-cost, high-speed telescopes for more advanced transient searches and intensity . to map efforts to probe deeper into the cosmos.

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