12/24/2023 0 Comments Train valley 2 radio telescope fast“We simply cannot extract all the science from this we need the world’s help.” Tuning in to CHIME “Since CHIME/FRB began operating in 2018, it has been like drinking from a fire hose in terms of the amount of data coming through,” says Emily Petroff, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at McGill who played a key role in refining the alert system ahead of its public release. The development is a key step towards bringing the resources of the international research community to bear on the data the CHIME/FRB project is generating. Accelerating the pace of researchįree to use for anyone who has access to the internet, the new system fulfils the CHIME/FRB project team’s goal of making every FRB detected by CHIME available for other telescopes to target with as little delay as possible. “The enormous volume of data that CHIME/FRB generates and the large number of new FRBs that it detects each day is like a gold mine for a community that is eager to point every kind of telescope that exists at the next FRB,” says Andrew Zwaniga, lead developer of the CHIME/FRB VOEvent Service and a research assistant in the Department of Physics at McGill. With the new data sharing system, which uses Virtual Observatory Event (VOEvent), a standardized language for reporting astronomical events, key details about each FRB that CHIME detects can now be sent in real time to observatories all over the world, allowing them to train their instruments on the source and gather further clues towards unravelling the mystery of FRBs. It is not uncommon for the CHIME/FRB project to pinpoint several FRB events in a single day of operation as it sifts through nearly 1 million gigabytes of data gathered by the telescope. An antenna is such a conductor: it intercepts radio waves, which create a feeble current in it.McGill University scientists have developed a new system for sharing the enormous amount of data being generated by the CHIME radio telescope in its search for fast radio bursts (FRBs), the puzzling extragalactic phenomenon that is one of the hottest topics in modern-day astronomy. Radio waves can produce a current in conductors of electricity such as metals. Just as vibrating charged particles can produce electromagnetic waves (see the Radiation and Spectra chapter), electromagnetic waves can make charged particles move back and forth. Nevertheless, there is information in the radio waves we receive-information that can tell us about the chemistry and physical conditions of the sources of the waves. If cosmic radio signals were translated into sound, they would sound like the static you hear when scanning between stations. The radio waves we receive from space do not, of course, have music or other program information encoded in them. These must be decoded at the other end and then turned back into sound by speakers or headphones. In commercial radio broadcasting, we encode sound information (music or a newscaster’s voice) into radio waves. Like light, radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, but unlike light, we cannot detect them with our senses-we must rely on electronic equipment to pick them up. It is important to understand that radio waves cannot be “heard”: they are not the sound waves you hear coming out of the radio receiver in your home or car. During the first decade, he worked practically alone because professional astronomers had not yet recognized the vast potential of radio astronomy. Over the years, Reber built several such antennas and used them to carry out pioneering surveys of the sky for celestial radio sources he remained active in radio astronomy for more than 30 years. In 1936, Grote Reber, who was an amateur astronomer interested in radio communications, used galvanized iron and wood to build the first antenna specifically designed to receive cosmic radio waves. This rotating radio antenna was used by Jansky in his serendipitous discovery of radio radiation from the Milky Way.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |