University of Pennsylvania Physics & Astronomy Colloquium

Fast Radio Bursts are a recently discovered phenomenon consisting of brief (typically few millisecond) bursts of radio waves coming from far outside our Milky Way galaxy, indeed from cosmological distances. Their origin is unknown. I will review what is known about these mysterious sources, and how they can act as novel probes of the matter distribution in the Universe. I will focus on results from the CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project, which uses a new Canadian digital radio telescope that is revolutionizing our view of the fast transient sky. I will also introduce the CHIME/FRB Outriggers, which are pioneering the technique of “synoptic" Very Long Baseline Interferometry, providing precise sky localizations for >1000 CHIME FRBs, hence permitting host galaxy ID and redshift determinations.