New Australian-developed technology will aid astronomers search for the source of cosmic signals known as “fast radio bursts” – a mystery which has persisted since their discovery almost 20 years ago.
The Commensal Realtime ASKAP Fast Transient COherent (CRACO) upgrade is a new addition to CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.
“Once at full capacity, CRACO will be a game changer for international astronomy,” says Dr Andy Wang from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy (ICRAR).
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely powerful pulses of radio-frequency light that last just milliseconds but release as much energy as the Sun does over many days.
FRBs were first discovered in 2007 using the CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, but what causes them remains one of the greatest questions in astronomy today.
Already CRACO has been used to discover 2 FRBs, 2 sporadically emitting neutron stars, and improved the location data of 4 pulsars – fast spinning neutron stars that emit beams of polarised light from their poles.
These discoveries are described in a new article in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
The technology has since been used to find more than 20 additional FRBs.
“CRACO is enabling us to find these bursts better than ever before,” says Wang.
“We have been searching for bursts 100 times per second and in the future, we expect this will increase to 1,000 times per second.”
CRACO is a cluster of computers and accelerators connected to the ASKAP radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.
The system sifts through the trillions of pixels received by the telescope to find anomalies at the millisecond timescale, allowing researchers to quickly obtain more data and complete their own analysis.
CSIRO astronomer and engineer Dr Keith Bannister says the scale of observation enabled by the new technology is enormous.
“CRACO taps into ASKAP’s ‘live’ view of the sky in search of fast radio bursts,” says Bannister.
“To do this, it scans through huge volumes of data – processing 100 billion pixels per second – to detect and identify the location of bursts.
“That’s the equivalent of sifting through a whole beach of sand to look for a single 5-cent coin every minute.”
The team is increasingly expanding CRACO’s research targets to find even more exotic sources of cosmic signals.
“We’re also detecting long-period transients, which remain mysterious objects within our galaxy,” says Wang.
These are slowly repeating bursts of intense radio waves discovered in 2022.
“Both fast radio bursts and these transients were first discovered in Australia, so it is great that we’re continuing the path of discovery with this impressive technology,” Dr Wang said.
