Parkes

Yeah.

Yeah, but I think the other attractions in Paris, you've got like the Elvis Festival is very big.

In January, they have a massive Elvis.

I think it's possibly the biggest Elvis Festival in the world.

His name is Lewis.

He's about to cycle 400 kilometres from Sydney to Parks.

The long journey is in honour of his late son, Ben, who tragically took his own life five years ago.

Lewis is raising money for the Black Dog Institute.

And if we, depending on which way you go, but we want to do 400 Ks.

If we're a bit short, we'll make it up for it.

We'll make up for it after 400. after we get to Parks and not ride out towards Condobolin and make it up.

But I want to do 400km.

Mm-hmm.

So after the flood and everything, then w- we moved from Nyngan to a, a little place called Parkes, which is again in central New South Wales.

Mm-hmm.

And it was more the place where mom and dad grew up as children.

Fast radio bursts are flashes of radio emission lasting about a millisecond from far outside our galaxy.

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.

So take us back to the beginning.

You're from a, a country town in New South Wales, Parkes.

Yep.

What's Parkes famous for, mate?

[laughs] The Dish.

Yeah.

Probably two things.

Um, no, a lot of things.

Only eleven of the unidentified tran-transient radio pulses have ever been recorded, uh, before around the world.

I've got it up on artbell.com now, and it is the, uh, curious new double blast, which was accompanied by four singles, which has baffled astronomers analyzing data now from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Emily Petroff from, uh, Swinburne University in Melbourne, one of the team who discovered these signals, believes the origin could be more remarkable than anything recorded before.

She tweeted, "We have no idea what's going on, but we know it's definitely something cool." The Parkes Observatory in Australia picked up the signals.

The discovery is being compared in significance to the recording of the Wow! signal, a strong narrowband radio wave found by Jerry Ehman in nineteen seventy-seven.

That radio burst, picked up by the Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University in the US, bore all the expected hallmarks of a non-terrestrial origin, but has not been detected since, right? If you wanna read more about this, and there's a lot more to read, uh, you're gonna wanna...

I'm sure other radio telescopes are going to be quickly, uh, honing in and seeing what they hear.

But this is a big one.