A new telescope has revealed an important clue in the hunt for the astrophysical sources of powerful, enigmatic radio bursts. Canada’s Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), inaugurated last fall at a remote site in British Columbia, has spotted a new burst at a lower frequency than any previous detections. The new discovery should provide insight into the elusive origins of the strange bright signals, and augurs a dawning era in which they will be found and studied by the thousands.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are blasts of energy that span just a fraction of a second but can shine brighter than half a billion suns at radio wavelengths. First identified in 2007, FRBs appear randomly on the sky, their light so fleeting scientists have struggled to trace them back to any obvious source. Of the 35 previously known bursts, only one has been found to repeat—offering astronomers a chance at more detailed studies, and confirming some FRBs must come from sources that somehow survive the extreme events required to produce such intense energies. This repeating FRB was eventually traced to a region of intense star formation inside a distant dwarf galaxy. All the others, however, remain tantalizing one-offs, despite astronomers’ efforts to watch for more repetitions.
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