Localizing Fast Radio Bursts and unveiling their extreme environments

 

 

 

 

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are radio transient sources that emit a single and extremely luminous flash with a duration of only a few milliseconds and of cosmological origin. This is one of the youngest fields in astrophysics right now, as the first FRB was only discovered in 2007. While thousands of them have been discovered up to date, the vast majority of these discoveries exhibit a limited (poor) localization in the sky, that unable us to associate them to known counterparts. This is one of the reasons of why the origin of FRBs still remains unclear.

In this talk I would provide an overview on Fast Radio Bursts and how the field has changed during these years, and how it is still dramatically evolving. I would summarize the efforts that led into the first precise localization of a FRB, showing that the bursts were produced inside a low-metallicity star-forming region in a dwarf galaxy. Remarkably, a very compact (<0.7 pc in size) persistent radio source with a very extreme environment was also found to be associated to them. This and later localizations of FRBs threw the idea that they must be associated with very young (tens, hundreds of years old) systems, likely involving magnetars. However, recently we have just found another FRB in a radically different environment: near the center of a globular cluster in M81.

How does this fit with the current scenarios trying to explain FRBs? What is the current state of the art of these sources? These are the questions we would explore along this seminar.

 

 

 

Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/pcw-gmem-jyi

Link da transmissão: https://www.youtube.com/c/AstronomiaIAGUSP/live