GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY LOCATION PATCH
GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY LOCATION FULL

GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY LOCATION PATCH

With the addition of the three new outrigger telescopes, this patch of sky can be reduced to the size of a quarter held at roughly 40 km,” explained Patrick Boyle, Senior Project Manager for the CHIME/FRB Outriggers project and Senior Academic Associate in the Department of Physics at McGill University.īy pinpointing FRBs, the new telescopes will allow scientists to zoom in on the environments within galaxies from which the bursts originate and, in so doing, narrow down the possible explanations for their existence.

GREEN BANK OBSERVATORY LOCATION FULL

“The CHIME telescope can currently locate the position of a fast radio burst to a patch of sky equivalent to the size of the full Moon. The outriggers will enable this radical leap. CHIME’s limitation, however, has been its inability to identify with any precision where the FRBs were coming from.

The telescope has allowed scientists to observe the vanishingly brief bursts with exquisite time resolution. With the ability to detect 10-100 times more fast radio bursts than all other telescopes combined, CHIME has had a radical impact on FRB science. “Despite the burdens of COVID, interruptions in the supply of steel for the antennas, and competition with bitcoin miners for the specialized computer chips that power their computational wizardry, the CHIME team is headed toward a spectacular improvement in the scientific yield of CHIME’s copious FRB discoveries.” “It has been a pleasure to work with the talented team developing the outriggers for CHIME,” said Robert Kirshner, Ph.D., Chief Program Officer for Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Supported by approximately $10 million in grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the CHIME/FRB Outriggers project has now secured funding to complete the construction of three new radio telescopes to work in conjunction with the main CHIME instrument, located in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. In the quest to identify the origins of one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries – fast radio bursts (FRBs) – Canada’s world-renowned telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), is getting backup.

Photo credit: National Science Foundation/Green Bank Observatory.

CHIME Outrigger telescopes boost search for fast radio burstsĬHIME’s new siblings will pinpoint bursts detected by Canada’s world-renowned telescope The new CHIME outrigger at Green Bank is currently Foundations for the CHIME outrigger telescope under construction at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.

Green bank observatory location