| Description |
Within the last few years a brand new type of radio source called a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) was discovered using the Parkes Telescope. FRBs are bright, short radio pulses that appear to only flash once, and only a dozen FRB sources have ever been detected. It is estimated that over 10,000 FRB events are occurring over the whole sky every day! The source of FRBs is still a mystery. While some suspect they are cataclysmic events like supernovae in other galaxies, others have proposed that they are giant bursts of emission from flare stars or pulsars. We are in the process of re-observing the locations of known fast radio bursts to search for any repeated pulses to test these predictions. The field of FRB science is still very new, and information on whether FRBs repeat, and how often, is critical to our understanding of these fascinating sources.
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ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management