The plan is to provide a brief historical overview of some of the most spectacular explosive events astronomers have observed since the big bang, and their connections to black holes and neutron stars. I good part of the talk will describe a newly discovered class of very bright events that are detected by radio telescopes at a few GHz frequency. These so called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) last for a few milli-seconds and have puzzled astrophysicists for about 10 years. It was established in December last year that these bursts are located at a distance of several billion light years away, and therefore the energy release in the radio band in these events is enormous. Within the last 6 months we have finally begun to understand the origin of FRBs which will be described in this talk.
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Event calendar file
