A team of scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have been awarded the 2020 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the best science paper of the year by the prestigious publication, Science.
CSIRO said the team of 54 astronomers were the first to pinpoint the location of a fast radio burst.
It said fast radio bursts (FRB) were intense pulses of radio emission that lasted only a fraction of a second and had confounded astronomers for more than a decade.
“The origins of FRBs were a mystery because radio telescopes lacked the precision to identify where they came from,” the CSIRO said.
“It wasn’t clear if they came from nearby stars or distant galaxies,” it said.
“To resolve the mystery, the team used CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, an array of 36 antennas in Western Australia.”
CSIRO said ASKAP was used to detect the burst and pinpointed its location using a ‘live action replay’ system.
Team leader at CSIRO and designer of the live action replay system, Keith Bannister said it was a great honour to receive the Award which was the result of “a massive team effort”
“Our results confirmed that fast radio bursts come from very distant galaxies,” Dr Bannister (pictured) said.
“With the power of ASKAP we can tell which galaxy a burst came from, and also pinpoint its location within that galaxy,” he said.
