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The repeating FRB detected this past summer by CHIME is only the second one of its kind ever recorded, following one that was detected in 2012.

“Until now, there was only one known repeating FRB. Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there,” said Ingrid Stairs, a University of B.C. astrophysicist and member of the CHIME team. “And with more repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to understand these cosmic puzzles — where they’re from and what causes them.”

CHIME maps the entire Northern Hemisphere every day, said Stairs, meaning it’s only a matter of time before more repeating FRBs are detected.

The telescope processes radio signals recorded by thousands of antennas with a large signal processing system and is the largest of any on earth.

The discoveries made by CHIME were presented Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle and published in a pair of accompanying papers in Nature.

The findings came during a two-week “pre-commissioning phase” this past summer, meaning the Okanagan Valley-based radio telescope was only running at a fraction of its full capacity.

“We’re very excited to see what CHIME can do when it’s running at full capacity,” said Deborah Good, a UBC PhD student in physics and astronomy who is working on CHIME. “At the end of a year we may have found 1,000 more bursts. Our data will break open some of the mysteries of FRBs.”

The CHIME team, which designed and built the telescope, includes 14 scientists from UBC alongside others from McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the National Research Council of Canada.

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