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Discovery of Fast Radio Burst

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January 12, 2019

Why in news?

Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has reported the sighting of a repeating fast radio burst from a distant galaxy.

What are Fast Radio Bursts?

  • Fast Radio Bursts are brief (few millisecond) bursts of radio waves coming from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy.
  • The phenomenon was first reported in 2007 and as of mid-2017, roughly two dozen have been reported and their origin is unknown.
  • However, they are ubiquitous: current best estimates suggest these events are arriving at Earth roughly a thousand times per day over the entire sky.
  • Of the known detected FRBs, one, FRB 121102, has been observed to repeat and has been shown to come from a small dwarf galaxy at redshift 0.2.
  • Whether all FRBs repeat and/or are in dwarf galaxies is yet unknown.

What is CHIME?

  • The CHIME Telescope is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO), a national facility for astronomy operated by the National Research Council of Canada.
  • The DRAO site is protected against man-made radio-frequency interference by municipal, provincial and federal regulation.
  • The CHIME telescope's large collecting area, wide bandwidth and enormous field-of-view make it a superb detector of FRBs.
  • The CHIME FRB event rate is predicted to be between 2 and 50 FRBs per day.
  • So high an event rate promises major progress on this puzzling new astrophysical phenomenon.
  • Bright CHIME-discovered FRBs will be found in real time and reported immediately to the worldwide astrophysical community for multi-wavelength follow up.

What are the recent reporting of the CHIME?

  • A mysterious radio signal emanating from a galaxy far, far away has been detected by CHIME.
  • The discovery is significant because it’s only the second time ever a repeating signal has been observed by scientists.
  • In addition to the second repeater, the researchers were able to shed new light on FRBs because they detected them at a much lower frequency than previously recorded finds.
  • The radio bursts were observed by CHIME at frequencies between 400 megahertz (MHz) and 800 MHz.
  • The majority of previously detected FRBs were found at frequencies near 1400 MHz.

 

Source: Indian Express

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