2021
Victoria Kaspi
McGill astrophysicist uses new CHIME telescope to study Fast Radio Bursts in space
2021
McGill astrophysicist uses new CHIME telescope to study Fast Radio Bursts in space
Victoria Kaspi, astrophysicist and professor of physics at McGill University, is working to unlock secrets of the Universe. Specifically, she studies Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) – mysterious bursts of radio waves happening all over the sky. These bursts are very short – most last just a few thousandths of a second – and powerful, coming from far outside our Milky Way.
“But we don’t know what they are,” says Dr. Kaspi. “Currently a leading model is that they are magnetars, ultra-highly magnetized neutron stars. But we don’t know that for sure, or even that FRBs are not comprised of many different types of objects.”
Dr. Kaspi and her team are studying FRBs using the CHIME telescope, a newly constructed radio telescope in Penticton, B.C.
The astrophysicist shares this year’s prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Chryssa Kouveliotou of George Washington University for their contributions to our understanding of magnetars. “Through the development of new and precise observational techniques, they confirmed the existence of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields and characterized their physical properties,” says the Shaw Prize website. “Their work has established magnetars as a new and important class of astrophysical objects.”
This research was connected to a project Dr. Kaspi initiated and led to monitor magnetars in the Milky Way using X-ray telescopes, most notably NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and later NASA’s Swift Observatory. “My students and I studied a class of objects then called ‘anomalous X-ray pulsars’ and showed that they were actually magnetars, effectively approximately doubling the population of known magnetars.”
She says winning the Shaw Prize is “very gratifying, and especially to be co-awarded with Chryssa Kouvelietou, whose work I have admired for years.”
Speaking to the significance of her current work on FRBs, Dr. Kaspi says “nature seems to have found a way to make extremely powerful explosions; I think it is important to understand the underlying physics and know how this is possible.
“Moreover, FRBs, even if we never understand what causes them, are very useful as probes of the structure of the Universe. They have imprinted on them interesting information about the medium through which they propagated, allowing us a unique new way to understand the structure and composition of the intergalactic medium.”
Dr. Kaspi says international awards like the Shaw Prize are important “in the Canadian context because they show the world that excellent science, as judged by an international panel, is being done within Canada. This then helps recruit the top students and postdocs worldwide to Canada, which improves the overall scientific environment.
“I think it also demonstrates to the Canadian government and to Canadian taxpayers that their tax dollars going to science here are well spent.”
