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Comment by ljoshua | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating from a scientific perspective, but this line piqued my interest the most:

  The detection system used can process 20 Gigabytes of data per second.

Now I know that's not unheard of, but it certainly would be interesting from a technical perspective to know how it processes such volumes of data. (And also makes me think about a certain other party in current events that is processing vast volumes of data every second as well.)

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i would guess they're talking about FPGA correlators for the radio signal.

how are they estimating distance? the article says "the furthest one that we detected was 11 billion light years away" which is an odd statement to make about a signal from an unknown process, unless, say it was monchromatic (and of known rest-frame frequency, which likely implies some physical process, and redshifted).

This is from the link below, and I think it sums it up:

>> The beautiful sweep and pulse shape of the radiation obeys the theoretically-predicted relation for a burst of radio waves that has propagated across the universe.

My understanding is that it matches what a sharp burst should look like after passing through 11 billion light-years' worth of electrons.

http://theconversation.com/fast-radio-bursts-new-intergalact...

omega tau did an interesting podcast on radio telescopes which included a discussion about the specialized hardware radio telescopes use to process the signal data. I think it was on: http://omegataupodcast.net/2009/08/16-radio-astronomy-and-th...

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