| 18th of November 2016 |
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| Bright Radio Bursts Probe Universe's Hidden Matter |
| A paper led by Vikram Ravi,
published in Science today, entitled "The magnetic field and turbulence of
the cosmic web measured using a brilliant fast radio burst" discusses
FRB 150807, a fast radio burst discovered with the 13-beam receiver at
CSIRO's 64-m Parkes Telescope on the 7th of August 2015.
FRBs are flashes of radio waves originating well outside the Milky Way.
The FRB is extremely bright, but has low Faraday rotation, enabling a limit
on the magnetic field in the cosmic web to be set. The team is
led by Caltech postdoctoral fellow Vikram Ravi and joint CSIRO / Curtin
University research fellow Ryan Shannon. Other CSIRO researchers on the paper
are Keith Bannister, Matthew Kerr and Simon Johnston. More information: Caltech Press Release * The images above show CSIRO's 64-m Parkes Telescope (right), a time-frequency plot of the FRB by V. Ravi (top left) and the Parkes 21-cm multibeam receiver (bottom left). Reference: V. Ravi, R. M. Shannon, M. Bailes, K. Bannister, S. Bhandari, N.D.R. Bhat, S. Burke-Spolaor, M. Caleb, C. Flynn, A. Jameson, S. Johnston, E. F. Keane, M. Kerr, C. Tiburzi, A. V. Tuntsov, and H. K. Vedantham 2016, Science. |