3/15/2023 0 Comments Project heartbeat![]() ![]() ![]() National Science Foundation / Green Bank Observatory “The plan is to triangulate the position of the signals, similar to the way a cell phone GPS works.” The new CHIME outrigger at Green Bank is currently Foundations for the CHIME outrigger telescope under construction at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “Right now, we are building other, smaller CHIMES around the world,” he says. Michilli hopes that upcoming improvements to CHIME and multi-messenger observations of these events will yield more definitive information about their origins in the near future. Their spinning magnetic fields may play an important role for explaining subpopulations of FRBs.” Outriggers on the SkyĬHIME takes a wide view of the sky, which means that it captures lots of events (a few FRBs a day), but it can’t pinpoint their exact location. “This signal, with an imprinted periodicity, could be the clue that at least some FRBs are produced by rotating neutron stars. “New data like this is essential for building accurate models,” says Jens Mahlmann (Princeton), who was not involved in this study. There’s also some evidence that the emission has come from the star’s magnetosphere, the region around the star dominated by the star’s magnetic field, instead of even further out, as some models have predicted. “These beams of light flash in a particular way that look similar to what we saw in this event.” Artist’s illustration of magnetar, a neutron star with powerful magnetic fields. “Neutron stars emit radio waves as they rotate, like a lighthouse,” explains study lead Daniele Michilli (MIT). These and other peculiar characteristics provide some evidence that this strange FRB might come from around a neutron star. There are many hypotheses about what objects and circumstances might produce FRBs, ranging from supernovae to inspiraling neutron stars to collapsing pulsars - even technosignatures are under consideration.ĬHIME’s most recent FRB sighting, featured in the July 14th Nature, is unique in that it lasted about 3 seconds, much longer than the average FRB, and that emission pulsed like a heartbeat. In 2020, CHIME was among the telescopes watching when a magnetar, a rare, highly magnetic neutron star, emitted a low-power version of an FRB from within our galaxy.īut the case for magnetars isn’t beyond dispute. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope in British Columbia is well-suited to observing FRBs and has cataloged several hundred since it came online in 2018. But now, an international collaboration has detected a unique FRB that might finally give us some answers. The vast majority of those observed so far have come from far beyond our galaxy, and their origins remain mysterious. They are usually detected as singular events, but a few have been found to repeat. Photo courtesy of CHIME, with background edited by MIT Newsįast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely powerful flashes of radio waves that typically last only a few milliseconds. Using the CHIME radio telescope, astronomers detected a three-second flash from a far-off galaxy that contained beat with a surprising regularity.
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