3 ms·
I couldn't work this out from the article, might try digging around for it - How did they know to point the telescope in the right direction? If these bursts
by Cogito 12y ago
I couldn't work this out from the article, might try digging around for it -
How did they know to point the telescope in the right direction?
If these bursts last for a significant amount of time do they have an alert system set up monitoring for the event and then kick the telescope into gear? They were able to get other telescopes to observe the area of the burst, but it seems like they were too late, as they didn't even observe an after glow from the burst. This suggests the bursts do not last for any reasonably long amount of time.
Maybe they were just lucky? Normally the telescope's use is highly contested for so it would be quite serendipitous if they happened to observe the burst by chance.
- antognini 12y agoThe bursts are extremely short (roughly a millisecond long), so there's not enough time to point a telescope in the right direction. So far the discoveries of these fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been serendipitous. Based on the observed number of FRBs it's estimated that there are about ~2500 per day that would be detectable by a telescope pointed in the right direction. Here's a paper that goes into that estimate in much more detail: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.447.2852K http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.447.2852K