In the decade following their discovery in 2007, only 140 FRBs had been seen. Now, thanks to the launch of a large stationary telescope in the interior of British Columbia in 2018, the number of new FRBs detected has almost quadrupled for a total of 535. A McGill-led inter-university collaboration, has now put together the first CHIME/FRB catalogue.
More than 500 mysterious fast radio bursts have been detected by the CHIME radio telescope in its first year of operation, astronomers have revealed.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly from space, ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds.
CHIME has nearly quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts discovered to date, according to the CHIME Collaboration, which includes researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The telescope detected 535 new fast radio bursts during its first year of operation, from July 2018 to July 2019.
CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment), situated in British Columbia, Canada, has four 328-foot-long U-shaped cylinders, allowing it to detect signals from when the universe was between six and 11 billion years old.
Credits: Image: Courtesy of CHIME Caption: A sky map of FRBs based on CHIME detections reveals bursts distributed evenly across the night sky. Credits: Image: Courtesy of CHIME
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To catch sight of a fast radio burst is to be extremely lucky in where and when you point your radio dish. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, that blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace.
These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy. Their origins are unknown, and their appearance is unpredictable. Since the first was discovered in 2007, radio astronomers have only caught sight of around 140 bursts in their scopes.
Scientists used the CHIME radio telescope in Canada to detect 535 mysterious fast radio bursts in space over the course of a year. These bursts could be used to map the universe.