Saturday, January 18, 2020

Canadian scientists trace 2nd strange radio signal to nearby galaxy

Found in different galaxy than 1st signal, astronomers 1 step closer to finding out where these bursts thrive


An artist's impression of a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) reaching Earth. The colours represent the burst arriving at different radio wavelengths, with the long wavelengths, depicted in red, arriving several seconds after short wavelengths, which are shown in blue. This delay is called dispersion and occurs when radio waves travel through cosmic plasma. (Jingchuan Yu/Beijing Planetarium)

They travel through space, and they've puzzled astronomers since they were first discovered just over decade ago. They're called fast radio bursts, and thanks to a team of Canadian scientists, a new signal has been precisely located in a nearby galaxy. It's a major step to figuring out where these enigmas come from in our universe. 
The findings are in part due to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Fast Radio Burst collaboration, a team made up of more than 50 scientists across North America. The team collects data from a radio telescope stationed at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory south of Penticton, B.C.  
FRBs are bright bursts of radio waves that come from far beyond Earth's galaxy. Lasting less than a second, the phenomenon was first reported in 2007. Many have been spotted since, but only around a dozen have been shown to repeat — a quality crucial to spotting them again so researchers can find out more.


There are many theories of what they could be, but with such a small sample size, astronomers can't rule much out just yet. They've only traced the origins of two repeating signals so far.

An artist's impression of radio telescopes picking up a fast radio burst. (Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA)
"They're telling us something about an energetic arena we've had very little insight of to date," said Paul Delaney, a professor in the physics and astronomy department at York University who was not involved in the study. 
"It's going to give us a window into new astrophysics, and that gives us a better understanding of the universe as a whole," he said.
The team, co-led  by the universities of British Columbia, Toronto and McGill, along with the National Research Council of Canada, has been working toward that goal since 2017. 
The telescope's ability to look at large portions of the sky at a time gives the team a better look at the random and elusive behaviour of FRBs, said the University of Toronto's Mubdi Rahman, CHIME research associate and co-author of the study. 
"Unlike most other telescopes, CHIME stays stable and doesn't point at things. It lets the sky move," he said. 


After co-ordination with CHIME, the latest burst to be tracked, known as FRB 180916.j0158+65, was spotted and tracked by the European VLBI Network, eight telescopes spanning the globe.
The eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii was the crucial last piece to trace the FRB to a spiral galaxy 500 million light years away, according to results published in the Jan. 9 edition of Nature
Since the discovery, scientists have found nine more repeating signals from space, according to a report released earlier this week. That means they could be localized, too, identifying the environments in space they come from, what causes them — and eventually, what these massive energy bursts are.  

Astronomers using the CHIME telescope in B.C., seen here, have tracked two repeating fast radio bursts to different galaxies outside the Milky Way. (CHIME)
But CHIME can't localize FRBs on its own. After seeing the signals repeat, it can narrow down the origins to certain parts of the sky. CHIME can then team up with more precise telescopes to match it with a galaxy. It's set to get an extension in a few years that will enable it to localize data points on its own.
Right now, the telescope is predicted to detect between two and 50 FRBs per day, an event rate scientists consider very high. That's putting CHIME, a Canadian led and funded project, at the forefront of FRB research. 
CHIME was also behind the first repeater ever spotted, FRB 121102. It  was traced to a different environment, a dwarf galaxy in 2017.
Both repeaters tracked so far have been found to originate from star-forming galaxies, an attribute that might be important for further research, said Deborah Good, a post-doctoral student at UBC and CHIME researcher. 
"It's hard to say. We always have to be really careful about generalizing from a really small number like this," she said. "But it also means that every data point we get is super important."


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel Terrell is an intern at the CBC, where she loves uncovering the unexpected in the Health Technology and Science unit. She has a background in health communications and recently finished journalism school at Centennial College in Toronto.

An Unusual Radio Telescope Could Hold The Key To Understanding Fast Radio Bursts

Imagine you are looking up into the night sky, when you see a bright flash. It only lasts for a fraction of a second. Now imagine trying to figure out what it was. This is the challenge astronomers face when trying to study fast radio bursts (FRBs).
An FRB is a radio flash that only lasts for a few milliseconds. They seem to originate from other galaxies, which means they must be extremely powerful at the source. But we don't know what they are. Ideas range from powerful events around neutron stars or black holes to signals from advanced aliens.
It's the short duration of FRBs that makes them so difficult to study. We can't predict when one might occur, and most radio telescopes will only observe one if they happen to be pointing in the right direction when one goes off. What we need is a way to look for them across wide patches of sky. It would take a different kind of radio telescope.
Fortunately, there is such a telescope. Known as the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, it consists of four long parabolic reflectors than the more common dish telescope. Since it isn't focused on a small area of the sky, CHIME can capture FRBs when they happen.
One of the main goals of CHIME is to observe the distribution of hydrogen in the universe as a way to study dark energy. Atomic hydrogen is the most abundant element in the cosmos, and it emits a distinct radio signal known as the 21-centimeter line. By mapping hydrogen across the universe, CHIME can tell us how the universe expands. This is why CHIME is built to capture a wide portion of the sky.
During the summer of 2018, CHIME made three weeks of observations as part of a testing phase. During that time it observed 13 FRBs. That compares to the roughly 60 FRBs previously observed by other telescopes. One of the events CHIME observed is a repeating CHIME. These are rare but could provide the most important clues about these mysterious events.
It is estimated that when CHIME is fully operational, it could observe between two to fifty FRBs a day. It would be a wealth of data that could transform our understanding of them.
Reference: Amiri, M., Bandura, K., Bhardwaj, M. et al. "A second source of repeating fast radio bursts." Nature 566, 235–238 (2019)
Check out my website.
I'm an astrophysicist, professor and author. You can find most of my work at briankoberlein.com

Portrait found in gallery walls verified as missing Klimt masterpiece

Painting was stolen from Italian art gallery 23 years ago

Art experts have confirmed that a stolen painting discovered hidden inside an Italian art gallery's walls is Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, Italian prosecutors said Friday. The painting disappeared from the gallery during renovation work in February 1997. (Antonio Calanni/The Associated Press)
Art experts have confirmed that a painting discovered hidden inside an Italian art gallery's walls last month is Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, which was stolen from the gallery nearly 23 years ago.
The authentication of the painting announced Friday solved one of the art world's enduring mysteries — where did the missing work end up? — but left several questions unanswered, including who had taken it and whether it ever left the museum's property. 
A gardener at the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery in the northern Italian city of Piacenza was clearing away ivy last month and noticed a small panel door on a wall outside. He opened it and, inside the space, found a plastic bag containing a painting that appeared to be the missing masterpiece.
"It's with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic," Piacenza prosecutor Ornella Chicca told reporters Friday, as two police officers stood on either side of an easel bearing the recovered painting. 
Portrait of a Lady, depicts a young woman sensually glancing over her shoulder against a dreamy, moss green background. Klimt finished the painting in 1917, the year before he died. The Ricci Oddi gallery acquired it in 1925 and reported it missing in February 1997.  
Since the gardener's discovery on Dec. 10, the canvas had been kept in a vault of a local branch of Italy's central bank while experts used infrared radiation and other non-invasive techniques to determine if it was the original.
A gardener at the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery told Italian state TV in December that he was clearing ivy when he found a bag inside a space within the gallery's walls, which contained Klimt's Portrait of a Lady. (Italian Police/The Associated Press)
Experts said the painting was in remarkably good condition. One of the few signs of damage was a scratch near the edge of the canvas that may have resulted "from a clumsy effort to remove the portrait from its frame," said Anna Selleri, an art restorer from the National Gallery in Bologna, Italy. 
The experts who did the verification work found persuasive evidence in the work of their peers more than two decades ago. 
An Italian high school student, preparing for her graduation exams in 1996, noticed striking similarities between the painting and an earlier Klimt work of a woman with a similar posture and gaze — but wearing a hat and scarf, accessories that the artist didn't include in Portrait of a Lady
Intrigued by the observations of the student — who went on to become an art researcher herself — experts back then examined the artwork in the Piacenza gallery's collection and found that Klimt had painted it on top of an earlier portrait of a woman.
Experts studying the recovered work in recent weeks, with the aid of X-rays, saw the earlier portrait. Selleri said the radiation analysis revealed that while painting the later portrait, Klimt didn't redo much of the face, but used whitish pigment from the earlier version for the skin.
This image taken from a video distributed Dec. 11, 2019, by Italian police shows two forensic police officers approaching a metal panel in which a painting was found, in Piacenza, northern Italy. (Italian Police/The Associated Press)
Portrait of a Lady was officially listed as missing on Feb. 22, 1997, but might have been snatched from a gallery wall a few days earlier, during the exhibit preparation work.
So who stole the painting? Chicca said police were studying some traces of organic material on the recovered canvas in hopes they might provide leads. 
Asked if authorities knew if the piece had ever left the gallery's grounds, investigators said that's something else they hope to find out. 

'Too hot to handle'

As for why and when the painting ended up stashed behind a wall, journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor, the author of a book about the dramatic fortunes of Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, has an educated theory. 
Before the 1990s, Klimt was largely "considered an Austrian painter, but his stature really grew at this point," O'Connor said. When Portrait of a Lady was taken, the value of the art nouveau artist's paintings was "soaring," she said. 
O'Connor ventured that perhaps whoever took the painting stowed it behind the gallery's walls while waiting for news about the heist to die down but the stolen work proved "too hot to handle." 
"It would have been hard to sell it to a private buyer" on the so-called grey market, O'Connor noted in a phone interview from London. 
Some of Klimt's works have experienced stunning turns of fortune.
O'Connor's 2012 book The Lady In Gold chronicled the ultimately successful effort by a woman to recover Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
That portrait was snatched from the Bloch-Bauer home in Vienna in 1941 by a Nazi officer. The woman, Bloch-Bauer's niece, later sold the painting to cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder in 2006 for $135 million US.
Another famous Klimt piece is a second portrait of the same woman, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II. Oprah Winfrey eventually purchased that painting and reportedly sold it a few years ago for $150 million.
A visitor at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art views Adele Bloch-Bauer in April 2006, in Los Angeles. (Ric Francis/The Associated Press)

INFO GRAPHIC POOR STAY POOR

Sweeping generalizations’ on oil and gas investment breeds Western alienation
EX SASK PREMIER BRAD WALL, CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER NOW SAYS OK CLIMATE CHANGE IS MAYBE HAPPENING BUT NO RUSH TO FIX IT 

(GETTY)
Brad Wall is calling on institutional investors to avoid “sweeping generalizations” about Canada’s energy sector, as a growing number of asset managers prioritize climate change. 
The former Saskatchewan premier said blanket statements about energy and the fossil fuel divestment movement are peaking feelings of Western alienation. His comments come as Canadian energy producers face mounting pressure to disclose climate-related risk, and they race to cut their carbon footprints.
“I think it would be better for business if sweeping generalizations were replaced by a process that would identify those that have a lot more work to do and shouldn’t be targets for investment,” Wall told a lunch audience at the AltaCorp Capital Annual Investor Conference in Toronto on Thursday. 
“But also, [highlight] the companies that are champions and world leaders and are contributing to the fight on climate change, even as oil and gas companies,”
He points to carbon capture efforts at Whitecap Resources (WCP.TO), the Calgary-based oil and gas firm where he’s held a board seat since July. The company estimates its carbon sequestration efforts offset all of its corporate emissions.
CCS IS NEITHER CLEAN NOR GREEN IT IS AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD OF FRACKING
“There is a broader story than just Whitecap,” Wall said. “We have to take every opportunity to tell those stories.”
Last July, Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO)(CNQ), Canada’s largest oil and gas producer, announced it cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 29 per cent and methane emissions by 78 per cent since 2012. Earlier this month, Cenovus Energy (CVE.TO)(CVE) announced a plan to reduce per-barrel greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by the end of 2030. Those figures do not include emissions from the consumption of each company’s oil by the consumer.
Meanwhile, fear of a warming planet has seen energy investments increasingly lumped into the sin stock category along with firearms and tobacco. 
BlackRock (BLK), the world’s largest asset manager, recently said it would exit investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk.” 
“Because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to CEOs. “In the near future — and sooner than most anticipate — there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”
In an interview with the BBC late last year, outgoing Bank of England governor Mark Carney urged financial institutions to justify their continued investment in fossil fuels. He warned “a substantial proportion of those assets are going to be worthless.” Carney’s next job will be with the United Nations as special envoy on climate change and finance. 
Margaret Eve Childe, director of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) Research & Integration at Manulife Investment Management, sees quantifying environmental risk of individual investments becoming easier as more data becomes available. 
“At Manulife, we do scenario analysis on the asset management side,” she said during a panel discussion on Wednesday organized by Reuters Breakingviews. “There is a lot of noise out there in the ESG world. It's challenging for portfolio managers to consider which ESG factors are material.”
For Wall, a more nuanced approach to Canadian energy investment on Bay Street would help ease the strained relations he sees between Ontario and the Western provinces. 
“The alienation is real folks. Whether you think there is justification or not, it is real,” he said. “I happen to think there is justification for people to be frustrated.”
Jeff Lagerquist is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on Twitter @jefflagerquist.

Huawei CFO lawyers say her alleged crimes no crime in Canada



VANCOUVER — Defence lawyers argue a senior executive of the Chinese tech giant Huawei should not be extradited to the U.S. because her actions would not be considered crimes under Canadian law.
The extradition hearing for Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou is scheduled to begin Monday. Meng, the daughter of the company's founder, faces charges of committing fraud to try and evade U.S. sanctions on Iran. Huawei is China's first global tech brand and Beijing views her case as a political move designed to prevent China's rise.
“This is a case of U.S. sanctions enforcement masquerading as Canadian fraud,” say defence documents released Friday.
Meng was arrested at the Vancouver airport in late 2018 at the request of the U.S. government. American prosecutors allege she made misrepresentations to foreign banks, including London-based HSBC, about Huawei’s relationship with its Iran-based affiliate Skycom.
Last week, the Canadian Department of Justice released documents supporting its case the allegations against Meng meet the extradition test of “double criminality” meaning if they had occurred Canada, they would be criminal under Canadian law.
Defence lawyers dispute that claim, arguing it’s not illegal in Canada to do business with Iran.
“Canada not only permits banks to do business with Iran-based entities, it encourages them to do to,” the documents say.
The documents point out the prosecution has argued Meng’s action have caused HSBC to be placed at risk of financial prejudice for offering banking service to Huawei and Skycom because of U.S. sanctions.
”Simply put, a bank in Canada would not be concerned that Huawei’s relationship with Skycom could trigger sanctions risk," the documents say.
Meng made a brief court appearance Friday where lawyers discussed additional court dates. The first stage of the extradition hearing dealing is expected to last five days.
Meng is free on bail of and is living in one of the two Vancouver mansions she owns.
Beijing detained former two Canadians, ex-diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, in late 2018 in an apparent attempt to pressure Canada to release Meng. They have not had access to lawyers or their families.
Huawei is the biggest global supplier of network gear for phone and internet companies has become the target of U.S. security concerns because of its ties to the Chinese government.
Jim Morris, The Associated Press

Members of Congress visit Navy shipbuilder amid talk of cuts

BATH, Maine — The Democratic chairman and ranking Republican on a House Armed Services subcommittee toured Navy shipbuilder Bath Iron Works on Friday and offered assurances to shipbuilders amid reports of possible cuts.
Democratic Rep. Joe Courtney, of Connecticut, and GOP Rep. Rob Wittman, of Virginia, both members of the seapower and projection forces subcommittee, visited the shipyard at the invitation of Democratic Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, both of Maine.
The tour came several weeks after a memo was leaked that outlined an initial Navy proposal to cut shipbuilding.
One proposal would reduce the number of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers planned for construction from 12 to seven over the next five years. Those destroyers are produced at two shipyards, Maine's Bath Iron Works, a General Dynamics subsidiary, and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi.
Courtney and Wittman made it clear that they are strongly opposed to such a cut of shipbuilding, Golden said afterward.
“The Navy requested and Congress approved a multiyear procurement. This new proposal in the memo would nullify a contract that’s already agreed to. That’s pretty much unheard of,” said Golden, who is also a member of the seapower subcommittee.
Congress will have the final say, and shipbuilders should be heartened that there is bipartisan support in Congress for increasing the size of the fleet, not reducing it, he said.
Reports that the Navy was considering shipbuilding cuts and accelerated retirements of ships came as a surprise to many last month.
The proposed cost cutting comes as the Navy works to modernize its ballistic missile submarine fleet, replacing aging current Ohio-class subs with new Columbia-class nuclear subs. That program is putting pressure on the shipbuilding budget.
The Associated Press