China telescope picks signals from space

Beijing: Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts, mysterious signals believed to be from a source about three billion light years from the Earth, with the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the official media reported here on

Monday.

The scientists detected the signals with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and are carefully cross-checking and processing them, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

The fast radio bursts (FRBs) are the brightest bursts known in the universe.

They are called "fast" because these blips are very short, only several milliseconds in duration, but there is no reasonable explanation for their origin.

The detection of the repeated bursts might help shed light on the origin and physical mechanisms of fast radio bursts, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted researchers as saying.

Chinese scientists have installed a highly sensitive FRB backend on a 19-beam receiver on the giant telescope, and used it to observe an FRB source named FRB121102, which was first discovered by the Arecibo Observatory in 2015.