Fast Radio Bursts, video game cards, and the largest
telescope in the Southern Hemishphere
by Chris Flynn (Swinburne Uni)
Abstract. The UTMOST project is the
Swinburne University University of Sydney ANU upgrade of the Molonglo Radio
Synthesis Telescope, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. By installing
new receivers and a bank of GPUs, aka video games machines, we have increased
the the bandwidth by a factor of 5, the field of view by a factor of 4, and
given it much higher time and spectral resolution, all in order to find Fast
Radio Bursts. FRBs are bright, very short (few ms) bursts at radio wavelengths,
known to be of celestial origin, but otherwise quite mysterious. If they are
at cosmological distances, as seems likely, they will allow us to probe the
Intergalactic medium in completely new ways, quite apart from puzzle over what
they are. To date, no FRB has been seen at other than radio wavelengths, and
finding a host galaxy for an FRB remains a major challenge, to which UTMOST
could be the key. I will report on the commissioning which is ongoing and
science operations which are well underway, with timing of over 300 pulsars
weekly, catching 7 glitching pulsars, mapping in correlation and fanbeam modes,
followup of radio transients, detection of transient pulsars, and our first
Fast Radio Burst discoveries.
