Australian innovation ‘sifts' space for mysteries
The first trial of an Australian-developed technology has detected mysterious objects by sifting through signals from space like sand on a beach.
PERTH, AUSTRALIA, January 28, 2025 / EINPresswire.com / -- The first trial of an Australian-developed technology has detected mysterious objects by sifting through signals from space like sand on a beach.
Astronomers and engineers at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, developed the specialised system, CRACO, for their ASKAP radio telescope to rapidly detect mysterious fast radio bursts and other space phenomena.
The new technology has now been put to the test by researchers led by the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy (ICRAR) in Western Australia.
Results published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia present the discovery of two fast radio bursts and two sporadically-emitting neutron stars, and improved location data of four pulsars, enabled by the new technology. They have since gone on to find more than twenty fast radio bursts.
Dr Andy Wang from ICRAR, who led the research group and tested CRACO, said the team had found more astronomical objects than expected.
'We were focused on finding fast radio bursts, a mysterious phenomenon that has opened up a new field of research in astronomy.
'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,' Dr Wang said.
CSIRO astronomer and engineer Dr Keith Bannister who, along with his team, developed the instrument, says the scale of observation enabled by the new technology is enormous.
'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,' Dr Bannister said.
CRACO is made up of a cluster of computers and accelerators connected to the ASKAP radio telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country. Development of this technology reinforces Australia's international reputation as a leader in radio astronomy engineering and research.
'Once at full capacity, CRACO will be a game changer for international astronomy,' Dr Wang said.
CRACO has been engineered to sift through the trillions of pixels received by the telescope to find anomalies, alerting researchers the moment it spots something out of the ordinary, allowing them to quickly follow up to obtain more data and complete their own analysis.
Dr Wang and his team increasingly expanded CRACO's research targets to find more exotic sources.
'We're also detecting long-period transients, which remain mysterious objects within our galaxy. Both fast radio bursts and these transients were first discovered in Australia, so it is great that we're continuing the path of discovery with this impressive technology,' Dr Wang said.
CRACO will soon be made available to astronomers all over the world as part of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility, a suite of national research infrastructure which includes Murriyang, CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope.
The CRACO system was developed through collaboration between CSIRO and Australian and international researchers and was partially funded through an Australian Research Council grant.
Charlene D'Monte
+61 468 579 311
X
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube
Other
Legal Disclaimer:
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
a day ago
- New York Times
MRNA, Used in Covid Shots, May Help Rid the Body of H.I.V.
The technology that powered Covid vaccines may also lead scientists to a cure for H.I.V. Using mRNA, Australian researchers said they were able to trick the virus to come out of hiding, a crucial step in ridding the body of it entirely. The research, published last week in Nature Communications, is still preliminary, and so far, has been shown to be successful only in a lab. But it suggests that mRNA has potential far beyond its use in vaccines as a means to deliver therapies against stubborn adversaries. Short for messenger RNA, mRNA is a set of instructions for a gene. In the case of Covid vaccines, the instructions were for a piece of the coronavirus. In the new study, they are for molecules key to targeting H.I.V. 'mRNA is just this miraculous — I really do think miraculous — tool to deliver things that you want into places that were not possible before,' said Dr. Sharon Lewin, director of the Cumming Global Center for Pandemic Therapeutics in Melbourne, who led the study. Vaccines deploying mRNA instruct the body to produce a fragment of the virus, which then sets off the body's immune response. In the United States, the shots were initially hailed for turning back the pandemic, then viewed by some with suspicion and fear. Some officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have falsely said that they are highly dangerous and even deadly. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services sought to limit the vaccine's availability to pregnant women, children and healthy younger adults. The administration also canceled a nearly $600 million contract with the drugmaker Moderna to develop an mRNA shot for humans against bird flu. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Miami Herald
a day ago
- Miami Herald
Long line at the water fountain in Australia? It might be from all the cockatoos
In parks and reserves in western Sydney, stopping for a drink may take just a little bit longer. Across the Australian playgrounds, sports fields and public spaces, twist-handled water fountains allow the public to stop for water in the middle of their play. But starting in 2018, park rangers noticed humans weren't the only ones taking advantage of the refreshment. Large white birds with long, yellow crests were seen lining up along a fence waiting for their turn at the water fountain, researchers said in a June 4 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Biology Letters. They are wild sulphur-crested cockatoos, a group who earned the moniker of 'trash parrots' after the east Australian locals previously learned to open trash bins. 'Despite being globally threatened by habitat loss and the pet trade, parrots are often successful urban adaptors, with invasive and native populations established in cities worldwide,' researchers said. Hoping to learn more about the learned behavior, researchers set up trail cameras to capture video of the cockatoos drinking, according to the study. 'Between (Aug. 29 and Oct. 11, 2019), we installed two motion-triggered wildlife cameras pointing from either side towards a drinking fountain where we had previously observed cockatoos drinking,' researchers said. 'This drinking fountain, similar to others in the local area, consisted of a rubber top with embedded spout on a concrete stand of approximately (3.3 feet) high, with a twist and spring-loaded handle approximately (6 inches) from the top.' Not only did the images show the cockatoos were using the fountains, but they were forming lines in order to have access to the fresh water, according to the study. Video of the cockatoos using the fountain was shared by LiveScience. 'The behavior consists of a combination of actions involving both feet, bill and shifting body weight to start the water flow. This apparent complexity in behavior is potentially reflected in our finding that while it appeared to be well-established in the local population, only 52% of attempts by marked birds to operate the drinking fountain were successful,' according to the study. Previous research showed about half of attempts to open trash bins were successful, researchers said, so this second learned behavior followed a very similar success rate. The photos and videos showed 'extensive queuing for drinking fountains' which was different from the trash bins, but likely because 'water at drinking fountains is effectively infinite,' researchers said. 'Thus, while we observed higher success rates when fewer birds were around, all individuals could feasibly eventually access water,' according to the study. Water fountain innovation is said to be closer to a cultural exchange than evolutionary change, according to the study. Innovations 'live and die' with individual birds unless it is taught and learned by other cockatoos and then taught to the next generation. The fountain-drinking cockatoos were studied in western Sydney, in southeastern Australia. The research team includes Barbara C. Klump, David Walter, John M. Martin and Lucy M. Aplin.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Australia's giant extinct marsupials may be ID'd using tiny bone bits
While fictional depictions of fossil discoveries often feature someone finding an entire dinosaur bone in their backyard, the reality of paleontology usually involves puzzling over disparate fragments of a skeleton. Yet despite this often incomplete picture, even a tiny shard of bone can reveal new information—but only if scientists can be sure of exactly which species it belongs to. So how exactly do scientists determine where such fragments come from? One relatively new method for studying ancient bones is palaeoproteomics, the study of preserved proteins. A study published June 3 in Frontiers in Mammal Science describes the first successful use of this type of technique to characterize the bones of extinct species of Australian marsupial megafauna–the giant ancestors of today's Australian marsupials. The team took successful collagen samples from three such species: Protemnodon mamkurra, a giant kangaroo-like creature that is distantly related to today's kangaroos; Zygomaturus trilobus, a member of the extinct Diprotodontidae family that resembles a colossal wombat the size of a present day hippo; and Palorchestes azael, an unusual herbivore that bears a vague resemblance to a tapir. [ Related: Giant wombats the size of small cars once roamed Australia. ] Carli Peters of the Universidade do Algarve's MATRIX Project and one of the paper's co-authors, tells Popular Science that the research involved the use of zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, or ZooMS. 'ZooMS is … based on small differences in the main bone protein, collagen type I, between species/genera/families,' she says. These differences allow for the identification of a collagen 'fingerprint,' which can then be compared to a sample from an as-yet-unidentified bone. If the fingerprints match, you can conclude that the bones are from the same species. Study co-author and archaeological scientist Katerina Douka explains that this technique can be used to sort through large numbers of fragments in a way that is impractical for other methods such as DNA sequencing. 'Such screening is not practical using DNA due to library preparation and sequencing costs and computational power needed,' she tells Popular Science But while collagen is hardy and generally less susceptible to degradation over long timescales than DNA, Australia's harsh environment has nevertheless made finding usable samples difficult. 'Fossils deposited in hot, dry and arid places, such as large parts of Australia, lose their collagen very early…. The major challenge [has been] discovering bones that contain [enough] collagen to allow us to apply such type analyses,' Douka says, The bones used for the study were found in the country's relatively temperate southeast and were initially used for radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis of other specimens. This research revealed the presence of preserved collagen, and the team jumped on the opportunity to study them. As Douka points out, 'This is the first time that such markers [have] become available for Australian megafauna.' This new data immediately opens doors for new research. 'We could identify these species at sites where they were previously not found, furthering our understanding of the past geographic range of these animals,' says Peters. [ Related: Super-muscular 374-pound kangaroos once thumped around Australia and New Guinea. ] However, there remain many, many more species for which no markers currently exist. These include some of the most fascinating and iconic of Australia's megafauna. These include various members of the genus Diprotodon, the largest marsupial genus to have ever existed, and Thylacoleo carnifex, the 'marsupial lion' that emerged roughly 2 million years ago during the late Pleistocene and was the continent's apex predator for millennia. Like the rest of Australia's megafauna, Thylacoleo carnifex disappeared around 50,000 years ago. Why? No one knows exactly why, and while the leading theory is that humans were to blame–the extinctions of the last megafauna coincide roughly with the arrival of humans in Australia–any new research carries the tantalizing possibility of shedding more light on how these species met their ultimate demise. Douka hopes that new tools like ZooMS might be able to 'help confirm or deny suggestions that early Aboriginals co-existed with megafauna in Australia.'
