1823 CSIRO FastRadioBursts v6_205MB 

[Music plays and images move through of satellite dishes against the night sky, and then Ryan Shannon talking to the camera and text appears: Dr Ryan Shannon, Swinburne University of Technology and the OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence]

Dr Ryan Shannon: As a scientist I like mysteries and I want to solve the mysteries. You want to understand what makes up the universe and where things come from.

[Music plays and text appears against a night sky: Australian scientists are uncovering new mysteries deep in outer space, These mysteries are known as fast radio bursts – FRBs]

[Image changes to show Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart talking to the camera with the satellite dishes in the background and text appears: Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart, Senior Lecturer, ICRAR/Curtin University]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: FRBs, Fast Radio Bursts are a modern astrophysical whodunnit. 

[Image changes to show a Fast Radio Burst against the night sky]

They last but a millisecond and we know that they come from somewhere outside our galaxy.

[Music plays and text appears across a night sky: Although they come from a large distance…]

[Image changes to show Ryan talking to the camera and then the image changes to show a Fast Radio Burst in the night sky again]

Dr Ryan Shannon: In that millisecond that they’re emitting, they outshine everything in the radio sky except the sun. 

[Image continues to show Fast Radio Bursts against the night sky]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: There are very many fundamental properties of Fast Radio Bursts that we don’t understand.

[Image changes to show Ryan talking to the camera]

Dr Ryan Shannon: We don’t know what causes them. They’re just such an extreme object that it has to be something weird.

[Image changes to show Jean-Pierre talking to the camera with satellite dishes in the background]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: There are lots of explanations. Are they two very dense stars merging in to one another? Are they stars that explode?

[Image changes to show Ryan talking to the camera]

Dr Ryan Shannon: Maybe it’s a neutron star and a black hole colliding, who knows?

[Image changes to show more Fast Radio Bursts against the night sky and then the image changes to show Jean-Pierre talking to the camera]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: And that’s why this research that we’ve been doing is so exciting because it has at last enabled us to get a handle on some of those fundamental properties of these bursts.

[Music plays and text appears across the night sky: It takes a state-of-the-art telescope to detect fast radio bursts]

[Image changes to show Dr Keith Bannister talking to the camera with satellite dishes in the background and text appears: Dr Keith Bannister, Principal Research Engineer, CSIRO]

Dr Keith Bannister: ASKAP is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. 

[Image changes to show a view of the ASKAP array and the image changes to show a world globe and the camera zooms in on Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory on the globe]

It’s a radio telescope that sits in the Murchison shire in Western Australia.

[Music plays and images move through of the ASKAP array again and then images move through of close-up views of the satellite dishes]

It’s a really unique instrument because it has this really amazing electronics called a Phased Array Feed. 

[Image changes to show a satellite dish moving around and then the image changes to show a view of the night sky]

With the Phased Array Feed we can see 36 different parts of the sky all simultaneously. 

[Image changes to show Keith talking to the camera with satellite dishes in the background]

This is really important for Fast Radio Bursts because we don’t know at any time, where in the universe a Fast Radio Burst is going to happen. So, the more sky you can cover, the better chance you have of seeing one.

[Music plays and text appears: It took the world’s telescopes 10 years to find about 20 FRBs, This team used ASKAP to find 20 in just one year, Here’s what they’ve learnt…]

[Image changes to show Ryan talking to the camera]

Dr Ryan Shannon: In this paper, we have presented the discovery of 20 Fast Radio Bursts. 

[Image changes to show a view of the night sky as seen looking through the telescope and then the image changes to show the ASKAP array moving simultaneously]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: In the past Fast Radio Bursts have been very difficult to work out exactly which galaxy they’re coming from.

[Image changes to show Ryan talking to the camera and the camera zooms in and then out on Ryan as he talks]

Dr Ryan Shannon: We’ve been able to measure the positions of brightness’s more accurately than other radio telescopes. We’ve been able to compare our bursts to previous bursts and confirm that the bursts are coming from halfway across the universe.

[Image changes to show blobs of colour trailing varying degrees of wavy lines and moving across the screen in front of the night sky and then the screen shows a merging of the colours]

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart: This research shows that these things can act as cosmic lighthouses. 

[Image changes to show a pink coloured ball at the bottom of the screen of the night sky and the camera zooms in on a speck of light which morphs into a world globe and then zooms in to show the ASKAP array]

Because we have this imprint of all of the matter that these things have propagated through, on their journey towards the earth, we can actually use them to weigh the universe. 

[Image changes to show coloured lines feeding down through the ASKAP array and then to computers on the inside of the buildings at the centre of the ASKAP array and then feeding to a computer screen]
 
And that matters because half of the non-exotic matter that you and I are made of, when we look about in the present day universe, we can’t find it. 

[Image changes to show Jean-Pierre talking to the camera]

And these things can actually find that matter, find where it’s lurking in the universe and find exactly how much is missing.

[Music plays and text appears against a night sky: ASKAP will play a key role in the future of this research]

[Image changes to show Keith talking to the camera with satellite dishes in the background]

Dr Keith Bannister: The future is really bright for ASKAP. 

[Image changes to show a satellite dish in the foreground and the rest of the ASKAP array in the background and then the image changes to show the satellite dishes moving against the night sky]

When we’re using the full array, we’ll get way more FRBs. So, we’ll find more and more of them at a much faster rate. 

[Image changes to show Keith talking to the camera]

We will be able to pinpoint exactly the galaxy that this particular FRB comes from. And when we do that, we can do a whole bunch of new science that has never been possible until now.

[Music plays and the CSIRO, ICRAR, OzGrav and Swinburne logos appear]