State of the Universe

A status review of Fast Radio Bursts

by Prof. Shriharsh Tendulkar (TIFR, Mumbai)

Friday, March 1, 2024 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at A034 and On zoom : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82512956967?pwd=angyQ0ZDdHZUdzFUbjkybmxsWFNFUT09 Meeting ID: 825 1295 6967 Passcode: 384194
Description
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a new class of millisecond timescale, extragalactic radio transients. With estimated luminosities between 10^42- 0^44 ergs/s, they are a trillion times more luminous than the pulsar pulses they resemble. Due to their prodigious volumetric rate (~10^4-10^5 FRBs Gpc^-3 yr^-1), and large reach (~Gpc), FRBs promise to be excellent cosmological probes — their dispersion and rotation measures can help probe baryon and magnetic field distributions in the Universe. However, before we use FRBs as cosmological probes, we need to understand their intrinsic properties and biases. We still do not know what the origins of FRBs are, whether repeating and non-repeating FRBs originate from the same astrophysical channel, and whether they are associated with other transients. In this talk, I will review the status of the field, and discuss some recent and new results from the CHIME/FRB, ASKAP, and GMRT telescopes.