McGill University | Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) | 2019 Jan 09
A Canadian-led team of scientists has found the second repeating fast radio burst (FRB) ever recorded. FRBs are short bursts of radio waves coming from far outside our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists believe FRBs emanate from powerful astrophysical phenomena billions of light years away.
The discovery of the extragalactic signal is among the first, eagerly awaited results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a revolutionary radio telescope inaugurated in late 2017 by a collaboration of scientists from the University of British Columbia, McGill University, University of Toronto, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the National Research Council of Canada.
In a resounding endorsement of the novel telescope’s capabilities, the repeating FRB was one of a total of 13 bursts detected over a period of just three weeks during the summer of 2018, while CHIME was in its pre-commissioning phase and running at only a fraction of its full capacity. Additional bursts from the repeating FRB were detected in following weeks by the telescope, which is located in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.
Of the more than 60 FRBs observed to date, repeating bursts from a single source had been found only once before – a discovery made by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2015. ...
Observations of Fast Radio Bursts at Frequencies Down to 400 Megahertz ~ CHIME/FRB Collaboration
- Nature (online 09 Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0867-7
- Nature (online 09 Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0864-x
