Okanagan telescope’s findings exceed scientists’ expectations
13 pulses of radio energy from outside galaxy recorded even though telescope wasn’t at full capacity
A team of scientists using a new telescope south of Penticton has found just the second repeating fast radio burst ever recorded, providing new clues about the brief, puzzling pulses of radio energy from outside our galaxy.
The repeating FRB was one of 13 new bursts detected in just two weeks by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, a radio telescope located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory.
The discoveries were described this week in two papers in the scientific journal Nature.
“Until now, there was only one known repeating FRB,” said Ingrid Stairs, a member of the CHIME team and astrophysicist at the University of B.C. “Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there. And with more repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to understand these cosmic puzzles — where they’re from and what causes them.
“With CHIME mapping the entire Northern Hemisphere every day, we’re bound to find more repeaters over time,” said Stairs. “Knowing where they are will enable scientists to point their telescopes at them, creating an opportunity to study these mysterious signals in detail.”
Studying fast radio bursts is challenging because they’re rarely spotted and mostly one-offs.
The repeating burst was one of a total of 13 bursts detected during a pre-commissioning run in the summer of 2018. The discoveries are particularly noteworthy because the telescope was running at a fraction of its full capacity.
“We’re very excited to see what CHIME can do when it’s running at full capacity,” said Deborah Good, a graduate student in physics and astronomy at UBC who is part of CHIME’s FRB team.
“At the end of a year, we may have found 1,000 more bursts. Our data will break open some of the mysteries of FRBs.”
While most FRBs have been spotted at wavelengths of a few centimetres, the latest FRBs were detected at wavelengths of nearly a metre, which opens up new lines of inquiry.
“The environment of the FRB has a much larger effect on the shape of the signals at long wavelengths,” explained Good.
“Seeing these bursts with CHIME will give us a good idea about what FRBs are like and where they come from, by showing us more about how their brightness changes at different frequencies and what’s happening to the signal on its way to Earth,” she added.
CHIME consists of four steel half-pipes wrapped in wire mesh that together form an array the size of six NHL rinks.
An avalanche of data from radio waves collected by the array is then fed into a super-computer that can complete seven quadrillion calculations per second.
The telescope was designed and built by scientists from the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the National Research Council of Canada.