Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have a story which has been told and retold many times over the past few years as they have sparked excitement and controversy since their pioneering discovery in 2007. The FRB class encompasses a number of microsecond- to millisecond-duration pulses occurring at Galactic to cosmological distances with energies spanning about 8 orders of magnitude. While most FRBs have been observed as singular events, a small fraction of them have been observed to repeat over various timescales leading to an apparent dichotomy in the population. ∼50 unique progenitor theories have been proposed, but no consensus has emerged for their origin(s). However, with the discovery of an FRB-like pulse from the Galactic magnetar SGR J1935+2154, magnetar engine models are the current leading theory. Overall, FRB pulses exhibit unique characteristics allowing us to probe line-of-sight magnetic field strengths, inhomogeneities in the intergalactic/interstellar media, and plasma turbulence through an assortment of extragalactic and cosmological propagation effects. Consequently, they are formidable tools to study the Universe. This review follows the progress of the field between 2007 and 2020 and presents the science highlights of the radio observations.
Highlights
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The bursts has isotropic equivalent energies of 3 × 1034 erg and 2.2 × 1035 erg for assumed distances of 10 kpc and 9.5 kpc at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) [74] and STARE2 [64] telescopes respectively. This burst was coincident with highenergy emission in the X-ray and Gamma-rays detected by several space-based telescopes, e.g., [75,76,77,78] resulting in the first contemporaneous multi-wavelength detection. This was a field-changing discovery as it was a step towards bridging the luminosity gap between Galactic sources and extragalactic Fast radio bursts (FRBs), and evidence that at least a subset of FRBs could be generated by magnetars as it could be associated to the low-end of the FRB luminosity function
While no short timescale period has been detected between successive bursts for an FRB yet, a couple of prolific repeaters monitored over several years have resulted in the identification of long term periodicity, e.g., [107,124]
Summary
Intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the distant Universe have altered our perception of the cosmos over the years, be it supernovae [6,7,8], pulsars, e.g., [9,10], Gamma-ray bursts, e.g., [11,12] or the more recent kilonovae, e.g., [13]. The pulse was detected in 3 beams of the 13-beam Parkes multi-beam receiver [19] and was so bright (Sν 30 Jy) that it saturated one of the beams This burst of radio emission was reminiscent of the signals discovered using Arecibo, and appeared to originate from beyond our Galactic neighbourhood. Simulations suggest that observational biases for FRBs without redshift estimates may cause the observed linear DM-z relation to be inverted such that the FRBs with the highest observed DMs may not be the most distant [37] This is yet to be observationally proven with localised FRBs. The observed DM shows that the radio signal bears the imprint of the ionised material it traverses and as a result the radio data are a gold mine of information. What was producing these energetic bursts? Did they occur in galaxies? Did they emit at other wavelengths? What could they tell us about the distant Universe? The questions and theories outnumbered the actual detections in the early days and began the worldwide race, to demystify and comprehend FRBs
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