Andrew Melchior
Oulu Cathedral
April 2026-April 2027
Oulu 2026
in association with
MIT Kavli Institute
The LOGOS Data
Catalogs
Catalog 1 — published June 2021
- 536 FRBs detected between 25 July 2018 – 1 July 2019
- 62 bursts from 18 known repeating sources
- Observed between 400 and 800 MHz
- First large uniform-selection-effect catalog from a single survey
Catalog 1 — Baseband Update — published October 2023
- Updated results for 140 of the original 536 FRBs for which raw voltage ("baseband") data were available
- Provided sub-arcminute localisation, ~10% flux/fluence uncertainty, three orders of magnitude better time resolution, and polarization data for all 140 events
Catalog 2 — published 14 January 2026
- 4,539 FRBs observed between 25 July 2018 – 15 September 2023
- From 3,641 unique sources, including 981 bursts from 83 known repeating sources
- 400–800 MHz at 0.983 ms resolution
- Includes all Catalog 1 events reprocessed under an improved uniform analysis framework
- 8.5× increase over Catalog 1
- 3,558 non-repeating sources and 83 repeating sources
What
The Logos is a collaboration between artist Andrew Melchior, astrophysicist Kiyoshi Masui, philosopher Timothy Morton and theologian Satu Saarinen. Working with real-time and archival data from the CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia, the project sonifies Fast Radio Bursts — preserving their temporal structure, spectral shape, and energy distribution in the translation from the electromagnetic to the acoustic.
The software engineering, synthesiser design and spatial audio integration for The Logos is created by Oliver Larkin.
The result is not music. It is not illustration. It is the faithful rendering of something the cosmos is doing that we have not yet fully explained.
An Exploration
Youngest burst (nearest source / shortest travel time)
FRB 20200120E has the lowest reported dispersion measure of any FRB at 87.82 pc cm⁻³, and has been associated with a globular cluster in the M81 galaxy system at a distance of 3.6 Mpc — roughly 12 million light-years. Detected by CHIME. That signal travelled ~12 million years to reach us. It's also the nearest extragalactic FRB, approximately 40 times closer than the next closest.
Oldest burst (most distant source / longest travel time)
The all-time record holder is FRB 20220610A, detected by ASKAP (not CHIME) in June 2022. It was localized to a morphologically complex host galaxy system at redshift 1.016 ± 0.002 — meaning the burst was emitted more than 8 billion years ago, when the universe was less than half its present age.