Alien Life ?: China Detects Three Mysterious Radio Signals From the Farthest Universe | the Chronicle

Three mysterious rapid radio bursts – known as FRBs – that occurred while the Universe was still in its youth, they were detected by the giant Chinese radio telescope FAST, 500 meters away.

Confirmed as their cosmological origin in 2016, these radio flashes which last only a few thousandths of a second, it has the potential to provide information on a wide range of astrophysical problems.

The doctor Niu chenhui, National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered three new FRBs with high diffusion measurement from FAST (Five-hundred-Meters Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) big data. Their results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 3.

The discovery indicated that these three FRB they happened billions of years ago, when the Universe was still in its youth. The newly discovered FRBs, along with the first FRB detected by FAST last year, suggest that there could be as many as 120,000 detectable FRBs reaching Earth each day.

“We are catching up on data processing and eagerly awaiting further discoveries from FAST, the world’s most sensitive radio telescope,” Chenhui said in a statement.

By comparing FRB samples from the Parkes Telescope and the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, Australian researchers revealed the relationship between fluence (integrated flux) and the extent of FRB dispersion. The new discovery it helps to broaden this relationship and covers a previously less explored space of parameters.

“Combined with simulations, FAST could detect FRBs with a redshift greater than 3, that is to say over 10 billion years”, Niu said.

The distribution of scattering measurements of these FRBs was sensitive to the shape of the intrinsic luminosity distribution of these cosmic events. “FASTER discoveries will help reveal the still unknown origin of FRBs”, said the doctor Li Di, study correspondent and chief scientist for FAST.