Recent reports showed, CHIME, the large stationary radio telescope in British Columbia has almost quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts or FRBs, detecting about 535 new bursts between 2018 and 2019 during its first year of operation.
CHIME stands for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, a radio telescope based in British Columbia that detects radio waves from space.
MIT News reported that to catch a fast radio burst is to be very fortunate as it depends on where and when points points the radio telescope.
FRBs are strange bright flashes of light that register in the electromagnetic spectrum's radio band. They blaze for a few milliseconds before they disappear without any trace.
Such brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in different and distant parts of the universe, including in Earth's galaxy.
The sources of FRBs are not known, and their occurrence cannot be predicted. Since the first bursts were discovered in 2007, as repored in the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, radio astronomers have only captured sight of roughly 140 bursts in their radio telescopes.
New Signals Arranged in First FRB Catalog
Researchers with the CHIME Collaboration, including scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have assembled the new signals in the first FRB catalog of the telescope. The catalog will be presented at a scientific conference of the American Astronomical Society this week.
The new catalog substantially expands the present library of known FRBs, hinting at new and exciting discoveries.
For example, the newly detected radio bursts appear to fall under two unique categories: "those that repeat and those that don't."
With this knowledge, scientists were able to identify 17 FRB sources that repeatedly burst, while the rest of the sources seem to be one-offs.
The CHIME Telescope
The CHIME radio telescope is composed of four gigantic cylindrical radio antennas, approximately the size and shape of snowboarding half-pipes. The radio telescope is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory operated by the National Research Council of Canada.
CHIME, a stationary array, doesn't have moving parts. Each day it receives radio signals from half of the sky as the Earth rotates.
Majority of the radio astronomy is conducted by turning in a swivel a large dish to focus light from various areas of the sky, an ability described as staring motionless at the sky. CHIME focuses on incoming signals through the use of a correlator, a powerful digital signaling processor that can work through large amounts of data, at a rate of roughly seven terabits per second, corresponding a few percent of the current global internet traffic.
Digital Signal Processing
According to MIT assistant professor of physics Kiyoshi Masui, digital signal processing is what's making CHIME telescope able to restructure and "look" simultaneously in thousands of directions.
That enables the CHIME team to detect FRBs a thousand times more frequently compared to a traditional radio telescope, said Masui who will lead the presentation of the research team at the scientific conference.
The CHIME telescope was able to detect 535 new FRBs during its first year of operation. When researchers mapped the locations of radio signals, they discovered the bursts were equally distributed in space, apparently from all parts of the sky.
From those FRBs that the CHIME telescope was able to detect, the scientists calculated that bright FRBs take place in the entire sky at a rate of roughly 800 a day, the most exact estimate of FRBs overall rate at present.
That is the beauty about radio astronomy -- it enables scientists to detect unusual, hard to see, and fast radio bursts, said Misui, a member of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Related information is shown on Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics' YouTube video below:
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