Sabrina Berger

McGill University

Fast radio bursts (FRB) are short, sub-second bursts that are some of the brightest objects in the radio sky when they go off. These bursts’ astrophysical origins are still unknown. Last year an FRB was localized to a magnetar, an extremely dense and magnetized stellar remnant, within the Milky Way. Localizing FRBs can narrow down their potential origins, a first step towards understanding what causes them. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) located in British Columbia, has discovered more than one thousand FRBs, orders of magnitude more than previous instruments. CHIME Outriggers is an upcoming experiment to use the original CHIME instrument along with other dishes spaced up to thousands of kilometers apart to create better localization capabilities. Sabrina’s research focuses on using Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) to help remove errors in localization of FRBs caused by the telescopes being located at different places on Earth. Hopefully, we’ll be able to localize many more FRBs to within their home galaxies in the next few years with CHIME Outriggers!

A dispersed (bottom panel) and dedispersed (top panel) spectra of the most prolific fast radio burst signal. This FRB repeats which has allowed us to observe it with various telescope arrays. Credit: Breakthrough Listen