Feature Astronomy

Searching for distant signals

A handful of fast radio bursts have astronomers puzzling over their origin, and looking for more

Parkes Radio Telescope

SNATCHING SIGNALS  Most of the fast radio bursts seen to date have been recorded by the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Yury Prokopenko/Getty Images

By Christopher Crockett

- More than 2 years ago

Duncan Lorimer wasn’t looking for an eruption of radio waves from another galaxy. He and his student David Narkevic were mining old data from Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope for oddly behaving pulsars, the rapidly spinning cores of dead massive stars.