Fast radio bursts are the focus of a young and fascinating field of astronomy. Researchers just released data on more than 500 new bursts, quadrupling the total number of detected events.
Andre Renard/CHIME Collaboration
Every day, thousands of mysterious radio signals flash across the universe, astronomers have found.
First discovered in 2007, these fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely bright flashes of radio waves that last just milliseconds and seem to occur across the universe. We still don’t know what causes them, but ideas include neutron stars with particularly strong magnetic fields, known as magnetars, or perhaps binary stars interacting in unusual ways.
Until 2018, FRBs had been notoriously tricky to find because of their short duration, meaning there were only 140 on record. But the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope came online that year, and now researchers working on it have announced a new catalogue of many more FRBs.
A Single Telescope Has Detected Hundreds of Mysterious Radio Signals From Space
9 JUNE 2021
In just its first year of operations, a Canadian radio telescope has quadrupled the number of detections of strange cosmic signals known as extragalactic fast radio bursts.
Between 2018 and 2019, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) detected 535 new signals. The new, expanded fast radio burst (FRB) catalog will allow scientists to better analyze statistical data.
In turn, this will help us to understand where these mysterious bursts originate, and use them as a tool to understand the wider Universe. Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, we ve discovered hundreds more, said astrophysicist Kaitlyn Shin of MIT and the CHIME collaboration.