Observations of Fast Radio Bursts at Frequencies down to 400 Megahertz

Understand

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are highly dispersed millisecond-duration radio flashes likely arriving from far outside the Milky Way galaxy.

• This phenomenon was discovered at radio frequencies near 1.4 GHz and to date has been observed in one case at as high as 8 GHz, but not below 700 MHz in spite of significant searches at low frequencies.
• Here we report detections of FRBs at radio frequencies as low as 400 MHz, on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) using the CHIME/FRB instrument.
• We present 13 FRBs detected during a telescope pre-commissioning phase, when our sensitivity and field-of-view were not yet at design specifications.