New type of Fast Radio Burst discovered in Green Bank Telescope data

Eight ultra-fast bursts lasted only ten millionths of a second or less

Artist’s impression of the discovery of microsecond Fast Radio Bursts being observed by the Green Bank Telescope. Incoming radio waves are shown as white, red, and orange streaks that follow each other in rapid succession. The long red streaks are the previously known millisecond flashes. (c) Daniëlle Futselaar/www.artsource.nl

An international team of researchers have discovered radio pulses from the distant universe that last only millionths of a second. They found these microsecond bursts after a meticulous examination of archival data from the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope. It’s unclear how the ultrafast bursts were created. The researchers published their findings in Nature Astronomy.

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Five Decades of Groundbreaking Millimeter Astronomy—From Discovering Molecules in Space to Imaging New Solar Systems

Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have awarded the 2023 Karl G. Jansky Lectureship to Dr. Paul A. Vanden Bout, Senior Scientist, Emeritus at NRAO. The Jansky Lectureship is an honor established by the trustees of AUI to recognize outstanding contributions to the advancement of radio astronomy.

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GBT Will Create New Sky Map

Image credit Dave Green.

Jack Singal, a physics professor at the University of Richmond, has received a $589,939 grant from the National Science Foundation to produce the first calibrated map of diffuse radio emission over nearly the entire sky.

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WVU Astrophysicist, Dr. Maura Mclaughlin, presents on behalf of NANOGrav at National Science Foundation (NSF) Meeting

Story by Elizabeth Rhodes

WVU faculty, students and interns watch the live NANOGrav announcement.
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Astronomers find multiple microsecond-length fast radio bursts in GBT data

Full-polarization, frequency-averaged profiles and polarization position angles (PPAs) for a selection of bursts. The top row shows the three brightest ultra-FRBs and the bottom row shows the three highest S/N millisecond-duration bursts. The profiles of the bursts (bottom panels) show the total intensity (Stokes I) in black, circular polarization (Stokes V) in blue and the Faraday-rotation-corrected unbiased linear polarization in red. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.02303
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