National geographic telescope uk1/6/2024 Normally, a signal from a celestial object will appear in just one of the feed antennas, or another if it’s really strong. The Parkes Observatory radio telescope has one antenna with 13 separate feed elements, each pointing at a slightly different part of the sky. Although what was causing these events was a mystery at the time, she gave them a name: perytons. But because of the way they appeared in the telescope data, she was virtually certain what she was seeing was some kind of Earth-based radio interference. Using observations taken by the radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, the same radio telescope Lorimer used to detect his FRB, she found more bursts that looked like FRBs. Her thesis adviser assigned her the task of finding more FRBs. The glitch explanation gained momentum from a paper by a young graduate student named Sarah Burke-Spolaor. Were these so-called Lorimer bursts, as some sarcastically referred to them then, just a technical glitch? It showed in this sentence from my report for that broadcast: “Sometimes, what seems like a remarkable scientific discovery turns out to be an error in the data.” Even though I did a segment about Lorimer’s discovery on the afternoon program All Things Considered, I was skeptical. When Lorimer’s paper came out in the journal Science, I was a science correspondent at NPR. A fragment of a pinkie bone found in a cave in Siberia allowed anthropologists to infer the existence of an entire population of humans who walked the Earth around the time of the Neanderthals. It’s not unheard of for one event to kick off a whole new field of scientific inquiry. He predicted there would be many more-but in 2007 he spotted just one. The problem was, Lorimer found only one of these spectacular new events. I likened them to a kind of dipstick for the density of the universe-a turn of phrase my editor loved that also happens to be accurate. If real, FRBs could be used to measure the amount of matter in the space between galaxies. He called his discovery a fast radio burst (FRB), because it lasted less than a second and it was only detectable using a radio telescope. It was a brief bolt of energy so powerful it could reach Earth from a galaxy billions of light-years away. In 2007 an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer reported finding a spectacular new kind of celestial event. If a scientist sees a unicorn, she’ll probably want to see more than one before telling the world about her discovery.
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