| Description: | On January 7th, 2020, I gave an invited plenary talk at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu, Hawai'i. The talk, attended by about 1,500 astronomers, gave an overview about what we've learned so far about "Fast Radio Bursts", and the much larger number of outstanding questions we're trying to answer in the coming decade. For example, our recent high-precision localisation of a second repeating Fast Radio Burst source using the EVN has raised more questions than it has answered. Deep observations of this source using the Hubble Space Telescope to target the EVN position may provide clarity.
We still don't know what creates Fast Radio Bursts, but regardless of their origin they are unique probes of the otherwise invisible Universe. By the end of 2020 it is likely that there will be more than 1,000 Fast Radio Burst sources known, of which dozens will be unambiguously localised to a host galaxy. Precision localisation to a host galaxy is the key step both to answering the astrophysical mystery of what creates Fast Radio Bursts and for using them as tools to study how matter is distributed in the Universe. |
