Daily Image
24-10-2023
100,000x faster than the blink of an eye
| Submitter: | Jason Hessels |
| Description: | In a paper published on October 19th by ASTRON/UvA PhD student Mark Snelders, entitled Detection of ultra-fast radio bursts from FRB 20121102A (Snelders et al. 2023, Nature Astronomy; open link), we present the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs) that last for only a few microseconds each - about 100,000x shorter than the blink of an eye. Inspired by earlier work by ASTRON/UvA PhD Kenzie Nimmo, using Effelsberg/EVN single-dish data (Nimmo et al. 2021), we asked ourselves whether `ultra-fast' radio bursts also exist (in addition to the normal millisecond-duration bursts we typically see). Mark identified the ideal data set to test this hypothesis: archival voltage data of the first-known repeating FRB taken using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Breakthrough Listen recording backend. These data provide the highest-frequency FRB detections to date (Gajjar et al. 2018), but previously the data were searched at a relatively coarse time resolution of 350 microseconds. In comparison, Mark re-searched the data at 2 microsecond time resolution - at first working together with UvA BSc project students Zakaria Bensellam and Lars Zwaan. It was a high-risk/high-gain project, and in this case it worked out! This artist's impression by Daniëlle Futselaar shows the GBT and an inset of one of the real bursts from the paper. We also wrote a Research Briefing describing the main results of the paper in a more accessible way. |
| Copyright: | Futselaar & Snelders |
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