Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a recently identified phenomenon involving bright yet brief (millisecond duration) bursts in radio waves that have traveled from extragalactic distances. The total number of published FRBs exceeds 600, of which over 40 have been localized to their host galaxies. Several dozen FRBs have been seen to repeat, and chromatic activity cycles have been identified in at least two sources. There are exciting prospects that FRBs could be used as an orthogonal cosmological probe that provides insight into the intergalactic medium and other ionized media along their lines of sight. However, the nature of FRB progenitor(s) is still an open question. At LPC2E, we have been using the NRT to monitor several repeating FRBs, successfully discovering dense forests of microshot bursts (Danté et al., 2023). We also hope to detect FRBs with NenuFAR (Decoene et al., 2023), which will open a new window at the very-low frequency range and shed light on the FRB emission mechanism(s). The LPC2E group members are also involved in other international FRB collaborations, including CHIME and MeerTRAP.