As you may have caught on Tuesday, this week was the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This is a smaller meeting but still rocks out a lot of science, with many teams holding their big releases for this event. 

For instance, the CHIME telescope collaboration shared their catalog of nearly 400 newly discovered fast radio bursts (FRBs). These weird flashes in the sky were first discovered in 2007. Seeing them is hard. They only last a few milliseconds, and they are star-like in size, just a pinprick of radio light. Prior to the construction of CHIME, they were found only when folks got lucky and happened to have a radio telescope pointed in the correct direction at just the right moment. 

CHIME is a new kind of radio telescope, and it uses half-cylinders, complex sensor arrays, and an even more complex software system to observe vast swaths of the sky simultaneously. From its location in British Columbia, it can observe the entire northern sky every day. Since it began operations in 2018, it has quadrupled the total known number of FRBs. With this kind of catalog, it begins to become possible to look for trends. 

Currently, FRBs can be divided into two groups: those that repeat and those that don’t. The eighteen known repeaters all appear to last slightly longer and emit light in a broader range of frequencies than their shorter, more narrow counterparts. This catalog also yields some spatial information. As the light from distant FRBs travels through the universe, clouds of material disperse the radio signal and highlight locations of that material. Using CHIME’s data, they are able to trace out the large-scale structure of our universe, one momentary flash of light at a time.

The data presented at this meeting is just a start. The longer CHIME operates, the more discoveries will be made. The more researchers get to explore the data, the more breakthroughs in understanding will be made. We’re still in the early days and I can’t wait to see what is yet to come.

More Information

McGill University press release

MIT press release

The University of British Columbia press release