This British Columbia facility operates CHIME, a revolutionary telescope that detects dozens of fast radio bursts daily. Mysterious millisecond signals from billions of light-years away.
Z22, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Listening for cosmic whispers
In British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, a area shaped by ancient glaciers provides natural shielding from the radio noise of modern civilization. This radio-quiet zone hosts the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO), established in 1960. The site's most striking instrument is the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME. It doesn't look like a typical telescope. Instead, four parallel, 100-meter-long half-cylinders give it the appearance of a massive snowboarding half-pipe array. Each cylinder is 20 meters wide, and together they create a collecting area of 8,000 square meters.
CHIME has no moving parts. It stares straight up, letting the Earth's rotation sweep a band of the northern sky across its view each day. Its purpose is to detect Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)—intense, unexplained pulses of radio waves that last only a few milliseconds. Before CHIME began full operations in 2018, fewer than 150 FRBs had ever been recorded. In its first year alone, CHIME detected 535 new FRBs, dramatically increasing the known catalog of these signals. The telescope's powerful digital processors sift through a staggering amount of information, processing data at a rate of about 7 terabits per second.
A legacy of astronomical innovation
While CHIME is the newest instrument at the observatory, the DRAO has a long history of radio astronomy. The facility's first major instrument was a 26-meter (84-foot) dish, now named the John A. Galt Telescope. Since its completion in 1960, this classic dish has been used for numerous projects, including making detailed maps of the Milky Way and participating in the first successful Very Long Baseline Interferometry experiments, which link telescopes across continents to create a virtual instrument of immense size.
Another important instrument is the Synthesis Telescope. This is not a single dish but an array of seven 9-meter antennas positioned along a 600-meter east-west track. By combining the signals from these smaller dishes, astronomers can create highly detailed radio images of celestial objects. The Synthesis Telescope operates at wavelengths of 21 and 74 centimeters, allowing it to map cosmic components like atomic hydrogen and ionized gas. The observatory also helps with monitoring our own star. Since 1990, it has been the home of Canada's solar radio flux monitoring program, which provides one of the longest-running and most consistent records of solar activity, a dataset known as the F10.7 index, used worldwide for space weather forecasting.
💡Fun Facts
The CHIME telescope was built using affordable, mass-produced components from the cell phone and video game industries, including low-noise amplifiers and high-end graphics cards.
The observatory is situated in a protected radio-quiet zone where the use of cell phones and other electronic devices is restricted to prevent interference with the extremely sensitive instruments.
The daily 10.7 cm solar flux measurement from DRAO is a global standard for tracking solar activity, a continuous record that began in Ottawa in 1947 before moving to the observatory.
The data rate processed by CHIME's computers is comparable to the entire world's mobile data network traffic.
Free guided tours are offered on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 3 pm, between early April and early November.
Admission
Free.
Accessibility
The site is an active research facility with outdoor terrain. Visitors must turn off all electronic devices, including phones and cameras, as their signals can interfere with the telescopes.
