Dec 2106 : UTMOST is hunting for Fast Radio Busts — FRBs — mysterious flashes of radio energy which last only for a few milliseconds which appear to have come to us from billions of light years away.

The telltale sign that the bursts come from so far away is the “swept signal” they show. For FRBs, this is seen as the higher frequency radio waves arriving at the telescope before the lower frequency waves.

In swept radio signals from FRBs, higher frequencies arrive at the telesocpe detectors before lower frequencies do — with a delay of as much as a second or more. Presently, this effect — known as the FRB “dispersion measure” — is our best means of estimating the distance to the source.  

As a direct consequence, better frequency resolution at the telescope means that we are able to detect FRBs with higher dispersions more easily.

UTMOST has spent the last two months upgrading its frequency resolution by a factor of 8 — a very significant improvement which could improve our ability to detect FRBs by a factor of 2 or 3 — depending on their intrinsic properties.

Congratulations on the huge effort by Andrew Jameson and Tim Bateman to get this new mode of operation rapidly written and commissioned during the last two months.

UTMOST is delighted to welcome two new members — both of whom arrived at Swinburne this week.

Adam Deller : Adam is an ARC Future Fellow, who rejoins Swinburne as a staff member after spending about a decade overseas (in the US and Netherlands). Adam did his PhD at Swinburne and it’s great to have him back. He has an ARC grant to work on FRB localisation in a project called UTMOST-2D — which will bring North-South detections back at Molonglo.

Jr-Wei “Jamie” Tsai : Jamie joins us as a postdoctoral fellow (funded by Matthew’s Laureate Fellowship), and comes to us from Virginia Tech, where he has worked on pulsars and transients with the Long Wavelength Array, as well as giant pulses from pulsars, cosmology and the early universe, and radio followup at low frequencies of gravitational waves.

UTMOST project leader Professor Matthew Bailes has been awarded a presitigious grant by the Australian Research Council to lead a Centre of Excellence on Gravitational Waves

http://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/latest-news/2016/09/new-arc-centre-of-excellence-for-gravitational-wave-discovery-announced.php

UTMOST team members Tim Bateman, Dave Temby, Ding Yan, Chris Flynn (taking photo), Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan and Kathryn Plant enjoying a mudcake in celebration with Matthew.

UTMOST has hosted a site visit by Wenhao Li, Hao Qiu, Haobing Wang, and Yunkai Wang (University of Nanjing) and Jan Hamann (University of Sydney).  The students are visiting the University of Sydney for two months as part of an exchange program for undergrads between China and Australia.

They visited the Parkes Radio Telescope (pictured) and the Molonglo Radio Observatory on Thurs/Friday 28-29/July.

At Molonglo, the students saw the telescope in a special mode of operation as it was part of a global observing program, involving 12 telescopes, to search for optical counterparts to Fast Radio Bursts, and radio counterparts to very faint optical transients.

We had the opportunity to show them the telescope in action, as well as data aquisition and processing with radio transients being detected in near real time, as well as discuss our science program, and research und study in Australia with UTMOST staff members Chris Flynn, Tim Bateman and postdoctoral fellow Stefan Oslowski and PhD student Manisha Caleb (ANU).

We welcome Tim Bateman, Stefan Osłowski and Kathryn Plant to UTMOST.

Timothy Bateman has started his new role at the Molonglo Observatory! Tim brings a wealth of experience to the project in digital electronics, especially involving Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Tim comes to us from CSIRO.

Stefan is starting a 5 year postdoc position with the project, and will be working on FRBs and pulsars amongst many other things. He obtained his PhD from Swinburne University in 2013, and has subsequently worked in Germany, initially at the Max Planck Insitute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and then as a Humboldt Fellow at Bielefeld University. We are very pleased to welcome him back to Swinburne.

Kathryn  is a PhD student at Berkeley’s radio physics lab, and will be working on major directions in our upgrade path using SNAP board technology over the next 12 months. Welcome Kathryn!

We welcome Wael Farah and Aditya Parthasarathy, both of whom will be starting their PhD work on projects on UTMOST.

Aditya comes to us from India, where he did a Bachelor of Engineering at Anna University in Chennai, and has worked at the Raman Research Institute and also at Swinburne as a visiting scholar in 2015. Aditya is initially developing an active scheduling system for UTMOST. Welcome back Aditya!

Wael has a BSc in physics (Lebanese University) and a MSc in astrophysics (Notre Dame University – Louaize). His masters’ work was on stellar atmospheric  parameter determination (theoretical and observational). Wael will be working initially on excising radio interference from Molonglo data and a live FRB alert system.

Thursday, 25/02/2016. The UTMOST team have been closely involved with the discovery of a Fast Radio Burst host galaxy, published in Nature today. The was lead by UTMOST’s Dr. Evan Keane. Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, are unusually bright and brief flashes of radio emission of uncertain origin – until now.

The burst was initially found as part of the SUPERB project running at the Parkes Radio Telescope. SUPERB team members spotted it within minutes of it taking place and sent emails to telescopes all around the world to follow it up.

UTMOST team member Shivani Bhandari, along with Dr. Simon Johnston, head of astrophysics at the CSIRO, used the ATCA radio telescope in Narrabri to make a radio image of a patch of sky within hours of the detection of an FRB with the Parkes Radio Telescope. They discovered a fading radio source for which they were able to give a precise location, after a multi-week campaign and many hours of observations.

A distant galaxy was then identified at this exact spot in images taken with the SUBARU telescope, and a spectrum of the host placed it at a redshift of 0.5, or about 6 billion light years away.

The research team was able to use the combination of the FRB’s and host galaxy’s properties to measure the amount of baryonic matter in the Universe — for the first time directly — obtaining a value in good agreement with previous, indirect determinations. This, in effect, is a means of weighing the Universe. The team found that 5% of the Cosmos is composed of baryons — or “ordinary matter” — the stuff from which people, planets and stars are made.

Fast Radio Bursts are a source of intensive research at UTMOST. Swinburne and Sydney Universities are currently working to transform the giant 18,000 square metre Molonglo telescope into a dedicated Fast Radio Burst finder, as part of Professor Matthew Bailes’ recently awarded ARC Laureate Fellowship.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this great result!

Links

Keane et al, 2016, Nature, 530, 453

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v530/n7591/full/nature17140.html

Some of the press coverage

ABC News Australia

BBC Science News

Daily Mail UK

The Australian

Scientific American

Science Alert

Washington Post

Physics.org

The National Youth Science Forum (NYSF) hosts 12 day residential program for students entering year 12 who are passionate about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

On 8th and 11th Jan, about 50 students in the 2016 program visited Molonglo and toured the telescope site, the supercomputing facilities and watched live operations observing pulsars and searching for Fast Radio Bursts.

Charlotte Brew has written up the experience here:

• Dick Hunstead, the Observatory director, spoke about what radio telescopes can detect and how we use Molonglo to map the Southern heavens.
• Duncan Campbell-Wilson spoke to the students on the real world engineering and operational requirements of an active research site.
• Ding Yang, who has just joined the site team after graduating with a degree in Engineering from the University of Sydney, talked about the motivation to study engineering (and which kind!), the path through university and search tips for employment.
• Chris Flynn demonstrated the telescope live (remotely from Swinburne University) and introduced the concepts of pulsars and fast radio bursts.

Thanks to all concerned for a very successful day!

In the movie Contact, actor Jodie Foster is famously seen listening to signals from space through headphones, in the hope of catching communications from aliens. The scene highlights how good the ear and the brain are at picking out an important signal from background clutter.

It turns out that this technique isn’t all dramatic licence, as early searches for pulsars in the decade after their discovery could have been performed by hooking the radio telescope signals up to an audio amplifier to listen for signals — the faster pulsars rotate at a rate of a few tens to a few hundreds of times per second — which is right in the audible frequency range.

Two quite slow pulsars have been converted into audio from data taken at Molonglo — in these two cases, the beat of the pulsar is so slow that each one is heard distinctly, rather than blending together into a continuous note, as faster pulsars do.

The Vela pulsar — beating at about 11 times a second corresponding to the rotation of the neutron star rotating 11 times per second…

The pulsar J1644-4559 — beating about twice a second, like a fast heartbeat after a run…

As Molonglo’s sensitivity increases with the ongoing commissioning of antennae and receivers, we’ll add to the library of audible pulsars…

Dec 3rd, 2015 : Official Opening  and Celebration of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Molonglo Telescope.

The launch of the new telescope took place during the 50th Anniversary of the original opening of the Molonglo Observatory by the Right Honorable Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia.

Cutting the ribbon to relaunch the telescope.

Ms Manisha Caleb, a postgraduate student from the Australian National University who is using the telescope for her research. Credit: Nick Smith

L-R: Astronomers Dr David Jauncey (CSIRO), Dr Bruce McAdam (University of Sydney) (at front), Dr Douglas Bock (CSIRO) (at rear), and Dr Tasso Tzioumis (CSIRO). Credit: Nick Smith

Group shot after the opening. Credit: Nick Smith.

In the press

The plaque for the opening of Molonglo by Sir Robert Menzies, 50 years ago, with reflections of the telescope, blue skies and summer crops. December 2015.