New space-sifting technology developed by Australian astronomers and engineers has detected more than 20 mysterious signals, with the scientists hailing the technology as a "game changer for international astronomy."
CRACO, developed by astronomers and engineers at Australia's national science agency CSIRO and installed on CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope, is made up of a cluster of computers and accelerators, allowing it to rapidly scan space and detect fast radio bursts and other space phenomena.
In the first test of the technology, researchers discovered two fast radio bursts and two sporadically-emitting neutron stars. They then went on to find more than 20 fast radio bursts, according to research published on Tuesday.
"We were focused on finding fast radio bursts, a mysterious phenomenon that has opened up a new field of research in astronomy," said research group leader Andy Wang from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy in Western Australia.
"CRACO is enabling us to find these bursts better than ever before. We have been searching for bursts 100 times per second and in the future, we expect this will increase to 1,000 times per second," Wang said.
"Once at full capacity, CRACO will be a game changer for international astronomy," he added.
Keith Bannister, a CSIRO astronomer and engineer among the tool's developers, said the scale of observation enabled by the new technology is huge.
"CRACO taps into ASKAP's 'live' view of the sky in search of fast radio bursts.
"To do this, it scans through huge volumes of data – processing 100 billion pixels per second – to detect and identify the location of bursts.
"That's the equivalent of sifting through a whole beach of sand to look for a single five-cent coin every minute," Bannister said.
