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FAST RADIO BURST 180916.J0158+65
FRB 180916.J0158+65 (less formally FRB 180916), is a repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) discovered in 2018 by astronomers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Telescope. In a study published in the January 9, 2020 issue of the journal Nature CHIME astronomers in cooperation with a European radio telescope network (VLBI) and the optical telescopes Gemini North on Mauna Kea, Hawaii were able to localize the source of FRB 180916 with a medium-sized spiral galaxy named SDSS J015800.28+654253.0 and located approximately 500 million light-years away. This makes it the closest FRB discovered to date.

Periodicity
Prior to the publication of the study in Nature, only two types of FRBs had been observed: Non-Repeaters or 'one-off' FRBs and Repeaters. Repeaters manifest unpredictable, sporadic, and irregular radiation bursts. RB 180916 appears to represent a completely new type of FRB: a Periodic Repeater. The radiation activity of FRB has a period of 180916 16.35 +/-0.18 days. The FRB emits bursts of radiation clustered into approximately four days followed by an inactive period of about 12 days.

Structure
The sub-burst pattern of radiation activity within the four-day bursts is never exactly repeated. However, there is enough similarity (i.e. alignment of the sub-bursts) to suggest that they form part of an original repeating pattern, with some an internal structure of some complexity, that has undergone distortion in the intervening 500 million years and 5 billion trillion kilometers.

Origins
The Study does not venture into speculation on the origin of such repeating regular bursts of radiation, other than to point out that the repetition rules out a catastrophic event, and that there are some similarities (but also some significant differences) to the observed behavior of Pulsars. Nevertheless, the popular reporting of, and public responses to, the CHIME study tend to focus on the possibility of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin. Subsequent information content analysis of the internal structure of the bursts (the frequency, duration, intensity and distribution of the sub-bursts) may shed light on this hypothesis.