They are the ghostly signatures of the most violent events in our universe. Now, thanks to a major technological upgrade, one of Australia’s most venerable radio telescopes—the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) array—is being brought back online to help hunt for their origins.
For almost six decades, in one form or another, the MOST array has been scanning the southern night sky from a rural valley outside Canberra. In its latest incarnation, as the UTMOST-2D array, it is now looking for fast radio bursts (FRBs)—intense, millisecond-long flashes of radio signals that occasionally streak through space from unknown sources.
These mysterious pulses of energy were discovered in 2007 at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Since then, they’ve been detected by multiple radio telescopes, but their causes remain largely unknown. They appear to be incredibly distant, which would mean they’re also extremely powerful—the brief releases of as much energy as our sun gives off in decades.
The UTMOST-2D project, a collaboration between the University of Sydney, Swinburne University of Technology, and other international partners, aims to pinpoint where in the sky FRBs originate from. This could help solve the puzzle of what astronomical events trigger them.
“We need to precisely locate the sources of FRBs to understand what kinds of objects or events produce them,” says Professor Anne Green from the University of Sydney, one of the project’s leaders. “Are they coming from neutron stars? Black holes? Something else entirely?”
The upgraded telescope uses 7,744 individual antennas arranged in a cross formation, giving it a unique ability to create high-resolution images of the southern sky. This configuration allows astronomers to triangulate the exact position of radio signals with remarkable precision.
