UBC wants to build a 2nd ‘ear’
Astronomers working to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the universe using a radio telescope near Penticton are planning to add a second “ear” to their system.
The new telescope would be built on a cattle ranch near Princeton that’s 85 kilometers west of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, which is home to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment.
CHIME isn’t a telescope in the traditional sense and has no moving parts. It consists of four steel frames that look like half-pipes and are wrapped in wire mesh. Each is four meters wide and 100 meters long, and together they form an array the size of six NHL rinks.
The new detector would be similar in design to the original, but only about a tenth of the size with a single half-pipe that’s one meter wide and 30 meters long.
By comparing the radio signals received at the two sites, scientists hope to pinpoint the galaxies from which they’re coming.
“If you hear something in only one ear, you don’t have a good sense where that sound came from. When you hear something in two ears, your brain figures out the minute differences in when the sound arrives and determines where the sound is coming from,” explained Mike Halpern, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of B.C. “All it takes is having that second ear. It doesn’t have to be that big.”
The fast radio bursts that CHIME is studying come from billions of light years away, so the two telescopes have to be far enough apart for there to be a discernible difference in the data.
Even with the second telescope nearly 100 kilometers away, though, the CHIME team only expects to be able to narrow down a signal’s source to a particular galaxy, said Halpern. (Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is estimated to be a billion billion kilometres across.)
Halpern on behalf of the CHIME team has applied to the Regional District of OkanaganSimilkameen for a temporary use permit to allow construction of the second telescope on land leased from Copper Creek Ranch.
A public information session is set for Aug. 17 and will be staged by videoconference to allow people a chance to find out more about the application, which will ultimately require approval from the RDOS board.
Halpern said the project has already gone to tender and, if all goes according to plan, the new telescope could be built by this winter.
His team’s search for fast radio bursts began in 2017, when the switch was flipped on the original CHIME telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, which is about a 20minute drive south of Penticton.
Radio waves are captured by wire mesh wrapped around steel frames, and the torrent of information is then sent to a super computer that can complete seven quadrillion calculations per second.
The computer sifts through the data for signatures of fast radio bursts, which are high-energy pulses lasting just 1/1000th of a second and believed to be emanating from massive stars in deep space. Once a fast radio burst is detected, the computers alert astronomers, who then try to verify it and figure out what produced it.
CHIME has recorded more than 1,000 such signals, which were only detected for the first time in 2007. If a pulse’s origin is known, the data it contains can then be used to extrapolate things like the density of space through which it travelled.