Between 2018 and 2019, Canada’s CHIME telescope detected 535 new radio eruptions called fast. The catalog, compiled from cosmic signs, will give researchers a better understanding of these astronomical phenomena and the workings of the broader universe, according to an article in the Science Alert Science portal.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are short-lived, very powerful strikes of cosmic radio waves. It is calculated that within a few milliseconds an amount of energy equivalent to 500 million suns combined is emitted. The first FRB was discovered back in 2007, but due to the unpredictability and brevity of the signals, scientists are still unable to study the phenomenon more comprehensively.
It is not enough to watch the right part of the sky, choosing the right wavelength is also necessary.
Fortunately, the CHIME telescope was developed specifically for hunting FRBs. A fixed telescope has four antennas capable of simultaneously studying a large part of the sky. The search tool is optimized for FRBs’ wavelengths, generating approximately 7 terabytes of data per second while it is running.
Before CHIME was created, we discovered fewer than 100 FRBs, and now we’ve discovered hundreds in a year.” Kaitlyn Shin, a researcher at MIT and CHIME Collaboration, outlined the equipment’s capabilities.
It is clear from the new catalog that FRBs are fairly evenly distributed in the sky (this fact makes it unlikely that they are the product of an alien civilization) and are very common – an estimated 9,000 FRBs per day.
Between 2018 and 2019, CHIME detected a total of 535 fast radio bursts.
Although the vast majority of them were single marks, there were also recurring marks.
Experts know little about the sources of fast radio bursts. In 2020, it was first proven to be one of the FRBs from the magnet (from the remains of a star with a very strong magnetic field), but the mystery is far from resolved – it is very easy to imagine that other sources and astrophysical phenomena can emit similar signals.
The researchers, based on the CHIME catalog, continue to investigate FRBs and are also looking to monitor new FRBs, thus expanding the ever-expanding database.
