Revolutionary radio telescope detects bevy of fast radio bursts
Scientists at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are part of a team that has discovered 13 fast radio bursts (FRBs), as well as the second repeating FRB ever recorded, using a revolutionary radio telescope. FRBs are short flashes of radio waves coming from far outside our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists believe FRBs emanate from powerful astrophysical phenomena billions of light years away, but they have yet to determine their origin. These discoveries are among the first, eagerly awaited results from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a revolutionary radio telescope inaugurated in late 2017 by a collaboration of scientists that includes MIT’s Kiyoshi Masui, an assistant professor of physics, and Juan Mena Parra, a Kavli postdoc. Masui and Mena Parra joined the MIT School of Science last fall from the University of British Columbia and McGill University respectively, where they worked on the Canadian-led project for the past...