A telescope with no moving parts, stationed in the mountains of British Columbia, has produced the largest single accounting of fast radio bursts ever assembled. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and its FRB collaboration have released a second catalog logging 4,539 fast radio bursts from 3,641 distinct sources, drawn from more than five years of continuous sky-watching between July 25, 2018, and September 15, 2023.

The result, posted to arXiv in January 2026 and published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, supersedes the collaboration’s first catalog, which covered a single year of observations ending in mid-2019 and recorded 536 bursts. The new release spans roughly five times the observing period and delivers more than eight times as many detected events, cementing CHIME’s role as the dominant instrument for cataloging these millisecond-long flashes of radio energy.

A telescope that cannot look anywhere else

CHIME’s design is unusual for an instrument that has become the world’s leading fast radio burst detector. Located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, British Columbia, it consists of four stationary half-pipe reflectors, each 100 meters long and 20 meters wide, laid side by side and oriented north-south. ICHIME has no moving parts at all — unlike dishes that swivel to track a target. Each cylinder’s focal line is strung with 256 dual-polarization antennas, for 1,024 across the array, feeding a digital signal-processing system that forms 1,024 beams electronically rather than through any physical steering.

That fixed geometry means CHIME cannot be aimed at a particular patch of sky the way a conventional radio dish can. Instead, it watches a roughly 200-square-degree strip of sky directly overhead and lets Earth’s rotation carry the rest of the northern sky through its field of view over the course of a day. The technique, known as transit observing, trades the ability to target specific objects on demand for near-continuous coverage of a wide swath of sky, night and day — precisely the kind of monitoring that catching rare, unpredictable millisecond bursts requires.

What changed since the first catalog

The collaboration’s first catalog, released in 2021, logged just over 500 bursts from a single year of data. That release established CHIME as a serious FRB survey instrument and provided the first large, uniformly selected sample for statistical study. The new catalog is a different scale of effort entirely: it folds in more than four additional years of observing time, past the original one-year window, and pushes the source count past 3,600 — a population increase that lets researchers move from spotting a phenomenon to characterizing it as a class.

Fast radio bursts are intense pulses of radio waves lasting typically a few milliseconds, first identified in archival data in 2007 and confirmed as an astrophysical population in the years since. Most detected bursts appear to flash once and never repeat from the same location, but a minority repeat, sometimes many times, from sources that can be pinpointed to host galaxies. Among the 4,539 bursts in the new catalog, 981 come from 83 known repeating sources, while the remainder appear as one-off events, at least within the observing window. That repeater fraction, drawn from a sample nearly nine times larger than before, gives researchers a substantially firmer basis for comparing the properties of repeating and apparently non-repeating bursts, including their durations, frequency structure, and the dispersion imposed on the signal as it crosses intervening plasma on its way to Earth.

Why the larger sample matters

The physical origin of fast radio bursts remains only partly settled. Magnetars — neutron stars with extraordinarily strong magnetic fields — are the leading candidate source for at least some bursts, following the 2020 detection of a burst from a magnetar inside the Milky Way. But the diversity of burst durations, brightness, and repetition behavior recorded across thousands of events suggests more than one physical mechanism, or more than one class of source, may be responsible. Larger, more uniform catalogs let researchers test that diversity statistically rather than relying on a handful of well-studied individual sources.

Because each burst’s radio signal is dispersed — delayed by different amounts at different frequencies as it passes through free electrons in space — the catalog also functions as a probe of matter distributed between galaxies. That diffuse, low-density gas is difficult to detect by any other means, and a sample of thousands of bursts at known or estimated distances allows astronomers to map its distribution across large volumes of the universe, an application sometimes described as using fast radio bursts to weigh the cosmos.

The catalog paper reports each burst’s arrival time, dispersion measure, scattering timescale, and flux density, along with a dynamic spectrum across the 400–800 megahertz band CHIME observes, at just under a millisecond time resolution. That level of detail, applied uniformly across thousands of bursts rather than compiled from disparate instruments and detection methods, is what distinguishes a catalog release from a series of individual discovery announcements.

What comes next

CHIME/FRB’s outrigger stations — companion antenna arrays built at separate sites across North America — extend the core telescope’s ability to localize individual bursts to their host galaxies with far greater precision than CHIME alone can achieve, a capability that has already been applied to a subset of local-universe bursts drawn from the same multi-year dataset. As those outriggers accumulate their own detections alongside the main array, the size and precision of future catalogs are expected to grow further, sharpening the statistical picture the second catalog has already begun to draw.

The post Four fixed half-pipe reflectors in British Columbia, each 100 meters long and strung with 1,024 antennas, watched the same overhead strip of sky from July 25, 2018 to September 15, 2023 and logged 4,539 fast radio bursts from 3,641 separate sources, on a telescope that cannot be aimed. appeared first on Space Daily.

At a spry 36-years-young, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope just keeps on going. The groundbreaking observatory recently took a new image of a sprawling nebula located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is the largest of the small galaxies that orbit our home Milky Way galaxy, and it’s only 160,000 light-years away. Since it is relatively close by, astronomers can more easily observe star birth hot spots like LHA 120-N44 (or N44).

N44 is located in the constellation Dorado. It is dominated by two main features—a large central void and an outer shell made of dense, dusty gas. 

The central void is considered a “superbubble,” that spans about 210 by 140 light-years across. N44’s superbubble void was created by the powerful stellar winds and explosive supernovae from the glittery stars at the center. 

The shell surrounding the superbubble is made of all of the gas that was expelled when these stars in the void were born. Once the gas was swept away, it compressed and formed a shell around the superbubble. Now, new stars are forming in this compressed gas shell, making it an interesting target for astronomers. They are using N44 to study how stars form in this type of cosmic environment. 

“Their goal is to understand how long it takes from the collapse of cold gas clouds into dense knots to the moment nuclear fusion ignites in the heart of a newborn star,” NASA writes. 

The gas shell surrounding N44’s superbubble has intrigued astronomers for over half a century. It is energized by ultraviolet radiation from massive stars, which makes it glow and highlights several distinct features. In the 1950s, astronomer Karl Henize first catalogued the distinct features within the nebula’s star-forming complex. 

One feature is a smaller bubble (cataloged as N44F). It is an interstellar bubble blown by the intense stellar winds coming from one hot and massive star and is located in the upper-right corner of the new image. 

This Hubble Space Telescope image features the picturesque nebula LHA 120-N44, or N44. The interstellar bubble N44F is at the top right corner. Image: NASA, ESA/Hubble, D. Gouliermis.

An Hubble closeup of N44F released in August 2025 shows how the hot, massive star’s winds and radiation have sculpted the surrounding bubble over time and forged pillars of dusty gas.

The data used in this image is from observing program #14689; PI: Gouliermis. It used Hubble to survey N44 and take a census of its stars, cataloguing roughly 500,000 stars within the cluster, and some interlopers drifting in front of the nebula. Of the stars the team surveyed, roughly 30,000 are what astronomers call pre-main-sequence stars. These baby stars have not begun to fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores. Hubble’s highly-sensitive instruments were able to pick out faint objects in crowded clusters to find these young stars at work.

The post NASA’s Hubble pops in on a ‘superbubble’ appeared first on Popular Science.

High school students interning at an observatory in Hawaii have successfully imaged a pair of colliding spiral galaxies located deep within overlapping cultural constellations. Formally classified as NGC 7253, the two galaxies are over 200 million light-years away, and reside in both Pegasus and Ka Lupe o Kawelo, or “The Kite of Kawelo.”

“NGC 7253 is a fascinating object because it’s two galaxies that are merging into one over billions of years,” said Project Hōkūlani intern Raiyan Rahman. “But we mainly picked this object because it was one of the few that actually lay within a Hawaiian constellation.”

Rahman and the other students from Waiākea High School and the Volcano School of Arts and Sciences spent one week in fall 2025 at the Gemini North Hilo Base Facility in Hilo to learn more about observatory operations, astronomy, and identify a deep space subject to study using the facility’s telescope. They selected NGC 7253 for its location inside a major navigational constellation utilized by Hawaiian sailors for generations.

Despite being separated by four million light-years, the gravitational pull inside NGC 7253 is strong enough that the two cosmic neighborhoods are on an inescapable collision course. Over a period of about one billion years, the spiral galaxies will smash into each other and merge into a single amalgamation. When this finally occurs, its spiral arms will generate a massive uptick in star formations. These newborn stellar objects will then ionize nearby hydrogen gas to form H II regions. In the image compiled by the high schoolers, these H II regions are already visible in the areas of bright pink light.

Earlier this summer, another three students from Keaʻau High School and Kamehameha Schools also participated in Project Hōkūlani. Continuing on the work of their predecessors, they decided on an official name for NGC 7253—Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola, which roughly translates to “The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life.”

“After spending so much time on Maunakea, it was important to us to pick something that was both culturally and astronomically significant,” added Rahman.

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