Context

Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) have assembled the largest collection of fast radio bursts (FRBs).

• Researchers at the Pune-based Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) achieved it.

About

About CHIME

• Stationary: It is a novel radio telescope that has no moving parts.
• It is located in British Columbia, Canada.
• First exploration: The telescope has detected more than 500 new fast radio bursts in its first year of operation itself, between 2018 and 2019.
• Tasks: It was originally conceived to map the most abundant element in the universe, that is Hydrogen.
• CHIME has also discovered new "Fast Radio Bursts" and for monitoring many pulsars on a daily basis.
• Working: This telescope is optimized to have a high "mapping speed", which requires a large instantaneous field of view (~200 square degrees) and broad frequency coverage (400-800 MHz).
• The digitized signals collected by CHIME will be processed to form a 3-dimensional map of hydrogen density, which will be used to measure the expansion history of the universe.

What are fast radio burst (FRB)? The first FRB was spotted in 2007. A fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio pulse of electromagnetic spectrum. It blazes out from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds. It is caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood. Most FRBs are extragalactic. The first Milky Way FRB was detected by the CHIME radio telescope in April 2020.