Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)

Commission Date: September 7, 2017

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit radio telescope located in Penticton, BC, Canada. It consists of 4 semi-cylindrical reflectors, each with 2000 square meters of collecting area and 256 dual-polarization antennas. The telescope observes between 400 MHz and 800 MHz and covers an instantaneous field of view of ~200 square degrees. CHIME houses several electronic backends, which are tailored for specific scientific goals, such as generating cosmological maps of hydrogen density, detecting Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and observing and timing pulsars. In particular, the FRB backend operates at ~1 ms time resolution and ~ 0.4 MHz frequency resolution.

JSON-Serialized GCN Notices Types in GCN Kafka:

CHIME distributes alerts for the detection of fast radio bursts. These notices are published on the GCN Kafka topic gcn.notices.chime.frb.

The GCN schema and example JSON message files are available to use for CHIME FRB Schema. See the Schema Browser for more information on the properties defined in the schema.

Detailed description and examples of CHIME Notices are available in the GCN Schema GitHub project.

Yearly Trigger Rates:

For comments, questions, or concerns, feel free to reach out to Thomas Abbott at thomas.abbott@mail.mcgill.ca.