Abstract
We present the discovery of 25 new repeating fast radio burst (FRB) sources found among CHIME/FRB events detected between 2019 September 30 and 2021 May 1. The sources were found using a new ...clustering algorithm that looks for multiple events colocated on the sky having similar dispersion measures (DMs). The new repeaters have DMs ranging from ∼220 to ∼1700 pc cm
−3
, and include sources having exhibited as few as two bursts to as many as twelve. We report a statistically significant difference in both the DM and extragalactic DM (eDM) distributions between repeating and apparently nonrepeating sources, with repeaters having a lower mean DM and eDM, and we discuss the implications. We find no clear bimodality between the repetition rates of repeaters and upper limits on repetition from apparently nonrepeating sources after correcting for sensitivity and exposure effects, although some active repeating sources stand out as anomalous. We measure the repeater fraction over time and find that it tends to an equilibrium of
2.6
−
2.6
+
2.9
% over our total time-on-sky thus far. We also report on 14 more sources, which are promising repeating FRB candidates and which merit follow-up observations for confirmation.
Abstract
We demonstrate the blind interferometric detection and localization of two fast radio bursts (FRBs) with subarcminute precision on the 400 m baseline between the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity ...Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the CHIME Pathfinder. In the same spirit as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the telescopes were synchronized to separate clocks, and the channelized voltage (herein referred to as baseband) data were saved to a disk with correlation performed offline. The simultaneous wide field of view and high sensitivity required for blind FRB searches implies a high data rate—6.5 terabits per second (Tb/s) for CHIME and 0.8 Tb s
−1
for the Pathfinder. Since such high data rates cannot be continuously saved, we buffer data from both telescopes locally in memory for
, and write to the disk upon receipt of a low-latency trigger from the CHIME Fast Radio Burst Instrument (CHIME/FRB). The
deg
2
field of view of the two telescopes allows us to use in-field calibrators to synchronize the two telescopes without needing either separate calibrator observations or an atomic timing standard. In addition to our FRB observations, we analyze bright single pulses from the pulsars B0329+54 and B0355+54 to characterize systematic localization errors. Our results demonstrate the successful implementation of key software, triggering, and calibration challenges for CHIME/FRB Outriggers: cylindrical VLBI outrigger telescopes which, along with the CHIME telescope, will localize thousands of single FRB events with sufficient precision to unambiguously associate a host galaxy with each burst.
Abstract
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a drift scan radio telescope operating across the 400–800 MHz band. CHIME is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical ...Observatory near Penticton, BC, Canada. The instrument is designed to map neutral hydrogen over the redshift range 0.8–2.5 to constrain the expansion history of the universe. This goal drives the design features of the instrument. CHIME consists of four parallel cylindrical reflectors, oriented north–south, each 100 m × 20 m and outfitted with a 256-element dual-polarization linear feed array. CHIME observes a two-degree-wide stripe covering the entire meridian at any given moment, observing three-quarters of the sky every day owing to Earth’s rotation. An FX correlator utilizes field-programmable gate arrays and graphics processing units to digitize and correlate the signals, with different correlation products generated for cosmological, fast radio burst, pulsar, very long baseline interferometry, and 21 cm absorber back ends. For the cosmology back end, the
N
feed
2
correlation matrix is formed for 1024 frequency channels across the band every 31 ms. A data receiver system applies calibration and flagging and, for our primary cosmological data product, stacks redundant baselines and integrates for 10 s. We present an overview of the instrument, its performance metrics based on the first 3 yr of science data, and we describe the current progress in characterizing CHIME’s primary beam response. We also present maps of the sky derived from CHIME data; we are using versions of these maps for a cosmological stacking analysis, as well as for investigation of Galactic foregrounds.
Abstract
We present a detection of 21 cm emission from large-scale structure (LSS) between redshift 0.78 and 1.43 made with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. Radio observations ...acquired over 102 nights are used to construct maps that are foreground filtered and stacked on the angular and spectral locations of luminous red galaxies (LRGs), emission-line galaxies (ELGs), and quasars (QSOs) from the eBOSS clustering catalogs. We find decisive evidence for a detection when stacking on all three tracers of LSS, with the logarithm of the Bayes factor equal to 18.9 (LRG), 10.8 (ELG), and 56.3 (QSO). An alternative frequentist interpretation, based on the likelihood ratio test, yields a detection significance of 7.1
σ
(LRG), 5.7
σ
(ELG), and 11.1
σ
(QSO). These are the first 21 cm intensity mapping measurements made with an interferometer. We constrain the effective clustering amplitude of neutral hydrogen (H
i
), defined as
H
I
≡
10
3
Ω
H
I
b
H
I
+
〈
f
μ
2
〉
, where Ω
H
i
is the cosmic abundance of H
i
,
b
H
i
is the linear bias of H
i
, and 〈
f
μ
2
〉 = 0.552 encodes the effect of redshift-space distortions at linear order. We find
H
I
=
1.51
−
0.97
+
3.60
for LRGs (
z
= 0.84),
H
I
=
6.76
−
3.79
+
9.04
for ELGs (
z
= 0.96), and
H
I
=
1.68
−
0.67
+
1.10
for QSOs (
z
= 1.20), with constraints limited by modeling uncertainties at nonlinear scales. We are also sensitive to bias in the spectroscopic redshifts of each tracer, and we find a nonzero bias Δ
v
= − 66 ± 20 km s
−1
for the QSOs. We split the QSO catalog into three redshift bins and have a decisive detection in each, with the upper bin at
z
= 1.30 producing the highest-redshift 21 cm intensity mapping measurement thus far.
We present the implementation of a spectral kurtosis-based Radio-Frequency Interference detection system on the CHIME instrument and its reduced-scale pathfinder. Our implementation extends ...single-receiver formulations to the case of a compact array, combining samples from multiple receivers to improve the confidence with which RFI is detected. Through comparison between on-sky data and simulations, we show that the statistical properties of the canonical spectral kurtosis estimator are functionally unchanged by cross-array integration. Moreover, by comparison of simultaneous data from CHIME and the Pathfinder, we evaluate our implementation’s capacity for interference discrimination for compact arrays of various sizes. We conclude that a spectral kurtosis-based implementation provides a scalable, high cadence RFI discriminator for compact multi-receiver arrays.
The nucleotide sequence of molecular clones of DNA from a retrovirus, ARV-2, associated with the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was determined. Proviral DNA of ARV-2 (9737 base pairs) has ...long terminal repeat structures (636 base pairs) and long open reading frames encoding gag (506 codons), pol (1003 codons), and env (863 codons) genes. Two additional open reading frames were identified. Significant amino acid homology with several other retroviruses was noted in the predicted product of gag and pol, but ARV-2 was as closely related to murine and avian retroviruses as it was to human T-cell leukemia viruses (HTLV-I and HTLV-II). By means of an SV-40 vector in transfected simian cells, the cloned gag and env genes of ARV-2 were shown to express viral proteins.
We sequenced cDNAs, amplified by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which correspond to the carboxy-terminal portion of the 54-kDa protein of various cytopathic (cp) or noncytopathic (ncp) ...pestiviral strains. Except for the previously described insertions in two cp strains of the bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), we did not find comparable insertions in this gene in eight pestiviral strains. The predicted amino acid sequences of this 54-kDa protein portion contain a conserved cysteine-rich stretch remarkably similar to a “zinc finger-type” binding domain found in many gene-regulatory proteins. Thus, this protein maybe involved in the binding to viral RNA.
We have developed FFT beamforming techniques for the CHIME radio telescope, to search for and localize the astrophysical signals from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) over a large instantaneous field-of-view ...(FOV) while maintaining the full angular resolution of CHIME. We implement a hybrid beamforming pipeline in a GPU correlator, synthesizing 256 FFT-formed beams in the North-South direction by four formed beams along East-West via exact phasing, tiling a sky area of ~250 square degrees. A zero-padding approximation is employed to improve chromatic beam alignment across the wide bandwidth of 400 to 800 MHz. We up-channelize the data in order to achieve fine spectral resolution of Δν =24 kHz and time cadence of 0.983 ms, desirable for detecting transient and dispersed signals such as those from FRBs.
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