A Single Telescope Has Detected Hundreds of Mysterious Radio Signals From Space
9 JUNE 2021
In just its first year of operations, a Canadian radio telescope has quadrupled the number of detections of strange cosmic signals known as extragalactic fast radio bursts.
Between 2018 and 2019, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detected 535 new signals. The new, expanded fast radio burst (FRB) catalog will allow scientists to better analyze statistical data.
In turn, this will help us to understand where these mysterious bursts originate, and use them as a tool to understand the wider Universe. Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, we ve discovered hundreds more, said astrophysicist Kaitlyn Shin of MIT and the CHIME collaboration.
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The Dark Energy Survey, a global collaboration including researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has released DR2, the second data release in the survey’s seven-year history. DR2 was the topic of sessions at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was held virtually January 10-15.
The second data release from the Dark Energy Survey, or DES, is the culmination of over a half-decade of astronomical data collection and analysis with the ultimate goal of understanding the accelerating expansion of the universe and the phenomenon of dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for this accelerated expansion. It is one of the largest astronomical catalogs released to date. Keith Bechtol, assistant professor of physics at UW–Madison, has served as the DES Science Release co-coordinator since 2017, guiding the effort to assemble, scientifically validate, and document data releases for both cosmology analysis by the DES Collaboration and explorati
Scientists find most distant quasar to date
Artist rendering of a quasar. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva.
A team of astronomers including a University of Michigan researcher has observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth the most distant quasar discovered to date.
The quasar a luminous object with a supermassive black hole at the center sheds light on how black holes grow.
Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its current age, the quasar hosts a supermassive black hole equivalent to the combined mass of 1.6 billion suns.
In addition to being the most distant, and by extension, earliest, quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of superheated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light.