Inside the world of CHIME

It's been a busy few weeks at the normally quiet Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory — extremely quiet, because it's a no-electronics zone to allow the highly sensitive CHIME telescope do the ground-breaking work that put it in the media spotlight this month. 

Paul Scholz is a researcher with the CHIME team that discovered the second ever observed repeating Fast Radio Burst, a phenomenon that comes from far beyond our own galaxy and can help teach astronomers about the makeup of our universe. 

Scholz said the spotlight has been hard to get used to, since conducting interviews for print, radio and television didn't used to be in his wheelhouse, and it all happened so fast. 

"We turned on the telescope in July and right away we started getting some bursts. Very quickly, results came together. It feels like a sprint in that way," Scholz said. 

Despite the excitement, he said it's business as usual at the observatory, working hard to keep up the momentum from the exciting findings. Plus, the breakthrough didn't exactly come as a surprise. 

"The advantage is that CHIME sees so much of the sky at once, it's got an enormous field of view because of its cylindrical shape," he said. "We were always going to discover a lot of Fast Radio Bursts because of that."

Everyday life at the observatory continues as before — with everyone being extremely careful with their electronics. 

"Everyone has, you know, cell phones on them, we have a a lot of computers in the building, and they all generate radio signals that can be picked up by our telescopes and are much brighter than anything that's coming from space," Scholz said. 

They have special, sealed-in rooms that block signals where people can use electronics or, as is becoming more common, conduct media interviews, and their computers are kept in under their desks in shielded boxes. 

Scholz is looking forward to continuing the work on what he calls the "puzzle" of what Fast Radio Bursts are and what is generating them. One theory he's confident putting to rest, though, is aliens. 

"Intelligent life is certainly interesting, but Fast Radio Bursts, it's really hard to imagine it could be aliens," he said with a chuckle. "But a use of Fast Radio Bursts is because they're so far away and their emission travels through so much of the universe, we can learn things about how matter is distributed in our universe."

The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory has a visitors centre open to the public to learn more about CHIME and the other ongoing projects on site most days a week — just remember to shut off that phone.