The discovery of a fast radio burst that produces multiple flashes of radio waves had two important implications. First, this burst wasn’t being caused by a cataclysmic event.
“We knew that it has to be some mechanism that is capable of repetition,” says Chatterjee. “It can't be neutron stars crashing into each other and destroying themselves or something like that.”
And although FRB 121102 wasn’t erupting according to any predictable pattern, the astronomers knew that the radio bursts eventually would occur again in the same region of the sky, providing them the unique opportunity to observe it in action with much higher-resolution telescopes.
Chatterjee and his team used all 27 of the 82-foot-wide dishes at the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico. During some 83 hours of observations that took place over a period of six months, the astronomers obtained images of nine bursts from FRB 121102, allowing them to pinpoint its location.
'Alien' signals pinpointed as fast radio bursts come from dwarf galaxy | Daily Mail Online
“We knew that it has to be some mechanism that is capable of repetition,” says Chatterjee. “It can't be neutron stars crashing into each other and destroying themselves or something like that.”
And although FRB 121102 wasn’t erupting according to any predictable pattern, the astronomers knew that the radio bursts eventually would occur again in the same region of the sky, providing them the unique opportunity to observe it in action with much higher-resolution telescopes.
Chatterjee and his team used all 27 of the 82-foot-wide dishes at the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico. During some 83 hours of observations that took place over a period of six months, the astronomers obtained images of nine bursts from FRB 121102, allowing them to pinpoint its location.
'Alien' signals pinpointed as fast radio bursts come from dwarf galaxy | Daily Mail Online