New technology, developed in Australia, has detected mysterious objects sifting through space signals in its first trial.
Australia's national science agency CSIRO developed the “game changer” CRACO system for their ASKAP telescope, which is now being tested by researchers in Western Australia.
CRACO is designed to find anomalies in space by sifting through trillions of pixels fed into the telescope.
The moment something is detected the system alerts scientists who are then able to swiftly follow up with additional data and analysis.
Dr Keith Bannister, CSIRO astronomer and engineer who developed the CRACO with his team, says this new scale of observation is “enormous”.
“CRACO taps into ASKAP’s ‘live’ view of the sky in search of fast radio bursts. To do this, it scans through huge volumes of data – processing 100 billion pixels per second – to detect and identify the location of bursts," Dr Bannister said.
“That’s the equivalent of sifting through a whole beach of sand to look for a single five-cent coin every minute."
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