| 23rd of February 2015 |
|---|
|
| Real-time discovery of a fast radio burst (FRB) |
| by Ryan Shannon (CASS) & Vikram Ravi (University of Melbourne) |
| Ravi, Shannon and Jameson (2015) report the real-time
discovery, in 2013, of a fast radio burst (FRB 131104) with the Parkes radio
telescope, in a targeted observation of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy.
The dispersion measure of the burst is 779 cm-3 pc, exceeding
predictions for the maximum line-of-sight Galactic contribution by a factor
of 11. Ravi et al. hypothesize that the burst is associated with the Carina
dwarf galaxy. Follow-up observations at other wavelengths are necessary to
test this hypothesis. The left image shows the position of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy (large ellipse), the centre positions of all 13 beams (small circles) from the Parkes 21-cm multibeam system, with the beam in which the FRB 131104 was detected marked. The right image shows the signature of FRB 131104 in a time vs frequency diagram. |