Meet Adam Dong from UBC!

I am a graduate student at UBC and a member of the CHIME/FRB and CHIME/Pulsar collaborations. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright millisecond bursts in radio frequencies. There have been many theories over their origin, ranging from kilonovae to extraterrestrial activity; however, they remain a mystery. Recently CHIME/FRB has found that at least some of the population of FRBs can likely be explained by magnetars. I am also interested in pulsar science. Pulsars are dense objects which are the remnants of massive stars. They behave like lighthouses in radio frequencies and we detect them as pulsed emissions on Earth. I use CHIME/FRB as a giant net to find new pulsars candidates and CHIME/Pulsar as a sieve to filter out the noise from astrophysical signals.

Pulsars are used for many things, from low-frequency gravitational wave detections to testing fundamental physics. While we can utilize pulsars at great lengths, there have always been foundational questions, like their emission mechanism, left wanting. Several exciting varieties of pulsars that can help study their intrinsic properties are nulling pulsars, intermittent pulsars, and Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs). The place that each type of object holds amongst neutron stars is still a hotly debated subject, and they are often conflated. I am attempting to use CHIME/FRB to approach this problem.

Copyright 2016 Richard Shaw, drone photo of the CHIME telescope located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory a national facility for astronomy.

Je suis un étudiant au troisième cycle à l’Université de Colombie Brittanque. En plus, je suis un membre de deux collaborations: CHIME/FRB et CHIME/Pulsar. Les sursauts rapids en radio (FRBs en anglais) sont les sursauts brillants qui durent plusieurs milliseconds en radio. Il y a plusieurs théories qui décrivent leur origine; des théories constatent qu’ils proviennent des kilonovae et les autres constatent qu’ils proviennent de l’acitivité extraterrestre. Cependant, leur vraie origine demeure inconnue. Récemment, le collaboration de CHIME/FRB a trouvé qu’il existe une population de ces FRBS qui proviennent de magnetars. Magnetars sont les remnantes d’une étoile massive qui sont extrêmement denses qui ont des champs magnétique forts. J’utilise CHIME pour découvrir nouveux FRBs.