Rutgers University Astrophysics Colloquium

Fast radio bursts are millisecond-duration pulses of cosmological origin that were discovered at West Virginia University in 2007. They show amazing promise as probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe and provide a new window into the population of compact objects at vast distances. Although much of the details as to their origins remain mysterious, in this talk I will give an account of their discovery and what we have learned in the past seventeen years.