this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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How do they date a radio transmission?
Triangulation. It arrives at different locations at different times. Enough points gives you direction and distance.
You can't use triangulation for anything over a few light-years, the angles are just too acute. And even then, you need to use the full width of Earth's orbit (i.e. repeat a measurement at different times of the year).
I think they just know what the frequency distribution normally is for a burst like this when it is emitted, and use the redshift of the measured frequencies to estimate the distance. Plus they correlate it with the apparent source based on direction (a certain galaxy, in this case, which helped confirm the distance estimate).
The triangulation would mostly be for direction in this case, yeah. Unless we happened to have a radio telescope pointed at the right region of the sky at the time.