China's largest telescope has detected more than 100 mysterious radio pulses coming from a source around three billion light years from the Earth.

The strange signals are so-called fast radio bursts — rapid pulses of energy that come from unknown but high-energy sources out in space.

Researchers at the space observatory are continuing to monitor the signals, with the hope that further analysis will indicate how these radio pulses are being generated.

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China's largest telescope, pictured, has detected more than 100 mysterious radio pulses coming from a source around three billion light years from the Earth

The unexplained signals were detected by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope — also known as FAST — and are currently being cross-checked and analysed, Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers report.

The telescope was studying a fast radio burst source known as FRB121102, which was first spotted in the sky by the Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico, in 2015.

Astronomers at FAST have detected more than 100 bursts coming from FRB121102 since late August — the largest number of the pulses ever detected to date.

Fast radio bursts are tiny pulses of radio waves that last less than a few milliseconds and are the brightest radio phenomena known.

It is believed that the bursts are generated by a presently unidentified but high-energy process out in space.

The first fast radio burst was identified in 2007, based on data collected by the Parkes radio dish in New South Wales, Australia back in 2001.

Astronomers hope that studying the repeated bursts detected by FAST might help to determine exactly from where fast radio bursts come and how they are generated.

The unexplained signals were detected by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope — also known as FAST – in Jinke Village in the Pingtang County of China

The mysterious signals were detected by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope — also known as FAST, which is located in a natural depression in the landscape of southwest China's Guizhou Province, near Jinke Village

Located in a natural depression in the landscape of southwest China's Guizhou Province, near Jinke Village, the FAST observatory was completed in September 2016 and will start routine operations this month.

It is the largest and most sensitive radio observatory ever constructed.

The telescope's considerable observational power will be used by astronomers from various nations to study such phenomena as exoplanets, gravitational waves and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

However, the addition of a highly-sensitive secondary system to the giant telescope has enabled it to detect fast radio bursts with high efficiency and in real time at the same time as undertaking over observation tasks.

It is expected that FAST will allow researchers to pinpoint the origins of these mysterious pulses with significantly greater accuracy.

Researchers at FAST will continue to monitor burst from FRB121102 to gather as much information on the source of these pulses as possible.

FAST RADIO BURSTS ARE BRIEF RADIO EMISSIONS FROM SPACE WHOSE ORIGIN IS UNKNOWN Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study. The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst. This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages. Scientists searching for fast radio bursts (FRBs) that some believe may be signals sent from aliens may be happening every second. The blue points in this artist's impression of the filamentary structure of galaxies are signals from FRBs The first FRB was spotted, or rather 'heard' by radio telescopes, back in 2001 but wasn't discovered until 2007 when scientists were analysing archival data. But it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to agree it wasn't a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments. Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics point out that FRBs can be used to study the structure and evolution of the universe whether or not their origin is fully understood. A large population of faraway FRBs could act as probes of material across gigantic distances. This intervening material blurs the signal from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the left over radiation from the Big Bang. A careful study of this intervening material should give an improved understanding of basic cosmic constituents, such as the relative amounts of ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy, which affect how rapidly the universe is expanding. FRBs can also be used to trace what broke down the 'fog' of hydrogen atoms that pervaded the early universe into free electrons and protons, when temperatures cooled down after the Big Bang. Advertisement



