Fast radio bursts: What are they and where do they come from?

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are short (few millisecond) bursts of radio waves observed from far outside the Galaxy. Their origin is an ongoing mystery in astrophysics, yet their rate is hundreds per day across the whole sky, indicating a fairly common phenomenon in the Universe. The revolutionary Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope has exploded our understanding of FRBs by detecting them at an unprecedented rate of several per day. In this talk, I will review what CHIME has revealed about FRBs and what physical engines may be powering them. I will then discuss how new instruments, CHIME Outriggers and the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD), are leading to the next leap in our understanding of this enigmatic phenomenon.

Paul Scholz is an Assistant Professor in Physics and Astronomy at York University. He is an astrophysicist whose research centres on observational studies of transient and variable phenomena. He holds a PhD degree in Physics from McGill University. While a PhD candidate, he discovered the first repetition from an FRB source. This landmark discovery showed that the FRB phenomenon could not be caused solely by a cataclysmic phenomenon. He then was a Covington Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory where he worked on the construction and commissioning of the CHIME Fast Radio Burst instrument. Prior to his appointment at York, Scholz was a Dunlap Fellow the University of Toronto.