The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, is a radio telescope in British Columbia, Canada. CHIME was designed to capture radio waves emitted by hydrogen in the early stages of the universe. It can also detect fast radio bursts, or FRBs, and has found hundreds of them, MIT said.
The paper’s co-authors are Calvin Leung, Juan Mina-Barra, Kaitlin Shen, and Kiyoshi Masui of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Danielle Micheli. The university said Mitchell led the discovery of FRB, first as a researcher at McGill University and then as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.
CHIME picked up a signal from a possible FRB on December 21, 2019, and immediately caught the attention of Micheli, who was examining the data, the university said.
“It was extraordinary,” Micheli said in the statement. “It wasn’t very long, and it lasted about three seconds, but there were periodic spikes that were remarkably accurate, every split second—boom, boom, boom—emitting like a heartbeat.”
The eruption, designated FRB 20191221A, is the longest-running FRB, with the clearest periodic pattern detected to date, MIT said.
While the origin of FRBs is uncertain, astronomers doubt that the signal could come from a radio pulsar or one of two magnetic types of neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of massive stars. The source is located in another galaxy, several billion light years from Earth.
“There aren’t many things in the universe that emit precisely periodic signals,” Micheli said. “An example we know of in our galaxy are radio and magnetic pulsars, which rotate and produce a beacon-like radioactive emission. And we think this new signal could be a magnetar or a pulsar on doping.
The university said astronomers hope to observe more bursts of FRB 20191221A, which could help improve their understanding of its source and neutron stars in general.
“This discovery raises the question of what could be causing this extreme signal that we haven’t seen before, and how we can use this signal to study the universe,” Micheli said. “Future telescopes promise to detect thousands of FRBs per month, and by that time we may find more of these periodic signals.”
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