Fast Radio Bursts

Localisaing and studying FRB environemnts

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are very energetic extragalactic transient astronomical events. The observations of FRBs using many radio telescopes around the world have revealed that some FRBs repeat, while others are apparently one-off. Even for those that repeat, most sources do not emit bursts at predictable intervals. It is still an open question as to what causes such bright emission. To tackle this problem of uncovering the progenitors of FRBs, we need to detect as many sources as possible, localise them to their parent galaxies, and study the local environments of these events. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a transit radio telescope in Canada, that scans large portions of the sky daily to detect FRBs.

CHIME Telescope
CHIME Telescope at night. Image credits : Andre Recnik

CHIME has detected close to 4000 FRBs which includes about 50 repeating sources. To aid in better localisation of FRBs, the CHIME collaboration is building smaller CHIME-like “outrigger” telescopes in three locations spread across North America. Two of the outrigger telescopes, one in Allenby, British Columbia (about 100 km from CHIME main site), and another in the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, USA (about 3300 km from CHIME) have already been built and are currently in the commissioning phase. These outrigger telescopes will be crucial in making very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations to pinpoint locations of FRBs in the sky.