MeerKAT

Um, so, um, the other thing that I find interesting about this is, uh, it uses...

The, the, the da- the t- the data that have led to this discovery have come from MeerKAT, the, um, radio telescope-

Oh

... which is similar to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, uh, in Western-

...

Australia.

MeerKAT is its sort of equivalent in, uh, the High Karoo region of South Africa.

And a very, very effective telescope doing some fantastic stuff, and it's been used, uh, actually by scientists at the Centre for Astrophysics, um, uh, in, uh, the Smithsonian, Harvard and Smithsonian.

Right.

The MeerTRAP program was running on the MeerKAT telescope down in South Africa, and it caught a burst.

A massive one.

Uh, yeah.

Right.

And a single dish couldn't do it.

That's why the MeerKAT telescope is an interferometer.

Meaning it's multiple dishes.

The first was found in 2007 in archival data from Parkes, Muriang in New South Wales, and we still don't know for certain what makes them.

This one, FRB 20240304B, was caught on the 4th of March 2024 by the MeerTRAP system on the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa.

The radio signal suggested it was extremely far away.

The problem was that the world's largest ground-based telescopes could see no galaxy at all at that precise spot.

One thing to be clear about, this is the peer-reviewed version of a result first posted as a preprint in August last year, and the record distance was reported then What's new this week is publication in Science after review, along with NASA's release.

It's one burst, and one burst doesn't settle the origin question for the whole population.

But the team estimates MeerKAT could catch several bursts a year from beyond redshift one.

MeerKAT is a precursor to the SKA, and its low-frequency sibling is going up in Western Australia.

They used the upgraded giant meter wave radio telescope, the UGMRT in India.

They utilized the MeerKAT array in South Africa.

Both incredible facilities.

And they brought in the very large array, the VLA in New Mexico.

The UGMRT captured the low-frequency bands like band three at four hundred megahertz and band four at seven hundred megahertz.

Right, the lower end of the spectrum.

Then MeerKAT captured the mid-range at one thousand two hundred eighty megahertz, and the VLA Sky Survey provided the high-frequency data at three gigahertz.

Which is a brilliant setup.

Travis Lisk, N3ILS, tells us about this discovery.

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope has detected repeated bursts of radio signals coming from the Beta Pictoris planetary system and have traced it to a strong magnetic field surrounding the giant planet.

Researchers say that these are the first auroral radio emissions in history to ever be detected from an exoplanet.

The significance of the discovery, which the researchers published two weeks ago, means that researchers have found a way to measure the magnetic field of a young planet which, until now, was only theoretical.

Sadly, there wasn't enough data to make any great leaps forward in understanding.

Well, not until 2022 and MeerKAT's mind-blowing image.

Our third incredible telescope, the MeerKAT Radio Telescope at the South Africa Radio Astronomy Observatory, or SARAO, is comprised of 64 interlinked antennas, each with a 13.5 meter diameter parabolic dish spread over eight kilometers of radio silent zone.

Built over four years, the full array was inaugurated in 2018.

Its location in the Southern Hemisphere is perfect for imaging the center of the Milky Way, thanks to our Sun's axial tilt relative to its own position in the galaxy.

So MeerKAT has a direct line of sight into the CMZ and the galactic center.

Over the course of three years, an international team led by Dr. Ian Heywood, and including Zadeh, now professor at Northwestern University, directed MeerKAT to a 6.5 square degree portion of the galaxy, a section of the sky around 30 full moons wide, with Sagittarius A* right in the middle.

Using L-band radio frequencies of 856 to 1,712 megahertz, equivalent to wavelengths of 18 to 35 centimeters, they split this area into a 20-part mosaic, directing the telescope to survey each tile in turn over a total of 144 hours on target.