McGill University scientists have developed a new system for sharing the enormous amount of data being generated by the CHIME radio telescope in its search for fast radio bursts (FRBs), the puzzling extragalactic phenomenon that is one of the hottest topics in modern-day astronomy.

It is not uncommon for the CHIME/FRB project to pinpoint several FRB events in a single day of operation as it sifts through nearly 1 million gigabytes of data gathered by the telescope. With the new data sharing system, which uses Virtual Observatory Event (VOEvent), a standardized language for reporting astronomical events, key details about each FRB that CHIME detects can now be sent in real time to observatories all over the world, allowing them to train their instruments on the source and gather further clues towards unraveling the mystery of FRBs.

"The enormous volume of data that CHIME/FRB generates and the large number of new FRBs that it detects each day is like a gold mine for a community that is eager to point every kind of telescope that exists at the next FRB," says Andrew Zwaniga, lead developer of the CHIME/FRB VOEvent Service and a research assistant in the Department of Physics at McGill.

The Webb team has completed tensioning for the first three layers of the observatory's kite-shaped sunshield, 47 feet across and 70 feet long.

The first layer—pulled fully taut into its final configuration—was completed mid-afternoon.

The team began the second layer at 4:09 pm EST today, and the process took 74 minutes. The third layer began at 5:48 pm EST, and the process took 71 minutes. In all, the tensioning process from the first steps this morning until the third layer achieved tension took just over five and a half hours.

These three layers are the ones closest to the Sun. Tensioning of the final two layers is planned for tomorrow.

"The membrane tensioning phase of sunshield deployment is especially challenging because there are complex interactions between the structures, the tensioning mechanisms, the cables and the membranes," said James Cooper, NASA's Webb sunshield manager, based at Goddard Space Flight Center.

A meteor that caused an earthshaking boom over suburban Pittsburgh on New Year's Day exploded in the atmosphere with an energy blast equivalent to an estimated 30 tons (27,216 kilograms) of TNT, officials said.

NASA's Meteor Watch social media site said late Sunday a "reasonable assumption" of the speed of the meteor at about 45,000 mph (72,420 kph) would allow a "ballpark" estimate of its size as about a yard in diameter with a mass close to half a ton (454 kilograms).

If not for the cloudy weather, NASA said, it would have been easily visible in the daytime sky—maybe about 100 times the brightness of the full moon.

A nearby infrasound station registered the blast wave from the meteor as it broke apart, enabling the estimates.

National Weather Service meteorologist Shannon Hefferan told the Tribune-Review that satellite data recorded a flash over Washington County shortly before 11:30 a.m. Saturday and officials believed it was due to a meteor "falling through the atmosphere." Hefferan said a similar event occurred Sept. 17 in Hardy County, West Virginia.

Residents in South Hills and other areas reported hearing a loud noise and feeling their homes shaking and rattling.

Why the sun's corona reaches temperatures of several million degrees Celsius is one of the great mysteries of solar physics. A "hot" trail to explain this effect leads to a region of the solar atmosphere just below the corona, where sound waves and certain plasma waves travel at the same speed. In an experiment using the molten alkali metal rubidium and pulsed high magnetic fields, a team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), a German national lab, has developed a laboratory model, and for the first time experimentally confirmed the theoretically predicted behavior of these plasma waves—so-called Alfvén waves—as the researchers report in the journal Physical Review Letters.