Speaker: Kendrick Smith, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Abstract: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a recently discovered, poorly understood class of transient event, and understanding their origin has become a central problem in astrophysics. I will present FRB science results from CHIME, a new interferometric telescope at radio frequencies 400-800 MHz. Since 2018, CHIME has found ~20 times more FRBs than all other telescopes combined, including ~60 new repeating FRBs, the first repeating FRB with periodic activity, an FRB pulse in our own galaxy from a known magnetar, and millisecond periodicity in FRB sub-pulses. These results were made possible by new algorithms which can be used to build radio telescopes orders of magnitude more powerful than CHIME. Looking to the future, I'll talk about two projects in progress: outrigger telescopes for CHIME, and CHORD, a new telescope with ~10 times the CHIME mapping speed.