Fast radio bursts repeat on a 16-day cycle from space

There’s a weird telescope in British Columbia called CHIME with zero moving parts—it doesn’t even point anywhere, it just sits there while Earth rotates and scans the whole sky. It was built to study dark energy, but it accidentally became an FRB machine, logging 500+ fast radio bursts: millisecond flashes from billions of light-years away, including FRB 20180916B that hits on a real 16-day cycle (4 days on, 12 off). The leading clue isn’t aliens—it’s a magnetar in our own galaxy (SGR 1935+2154) that fired an FRB-like burst, while the 16-day pattern is still an active fight between natural models like a binary orbit or a precessing jet.