An Australian innovation is set to sift the universe for mysterious sounds and objects.
CSIRO astronomers and engineers have developed a specialised system, CRACO, which can be used in their ASKAP radio telescope to rapidly detect fast radio bursts and other space phenomena.
Dr Keith Bannister said the new technology had now been put to the test by researchers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy (ICRAR) in Western Australia.
Dr Bannister said the scale of the observation enabled by the new technology was enormous.
“CRACO taps into ASKAP’s ‘live’ view of the sky in search of fast radio bursts,” he said.
“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 five-cent coin every minute.”
He said CRACO had been engineered to sift through the trillions of pixels received by the telescope to find anomalies, alerting researchers the moment it spots something out of the ordinary, allowing them to quickly follow up to obtain more data and complete their own analysis.
Dr Andy Wang, from ICRAR, said the team had found more astronomical objects than expected in the trials, the results of which have been published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
“We were focused on finding fast radio bursts, a mysterious phenomenon that has opened up a new field of research in astronomy,” Dr Wang said.
“CRACO is enabling us to find these bursts better than ever before. We have been searching for bursts 100 times per second and in the future we expect this will increase to 1000 times per second.”
Dr Wang and his team increasingly expanded CRACO’s research targets to find more exotic sources.
“We’re also detecting long-period transients, which remain mysterious objects within our galaxy. 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,” he said.
Dr Bannister said CRACO would soon be made available to astronomers all over the world as part of CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility, a suite of national research infrastructure which includes Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.
