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Speaker |
Bailes, Matthew |
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Coauthors |
Bailes, Matthew |
| Talk Title |
On the Celestial Nature of the Fast Radio Bursts |
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Abstract |
The first known Fast Radio Burst (FRB) was the Lorimer burst (Lorimer et al. 2007), discovered in a survey conducted with the Parkes 13-beam multibeam receiver. The intensity of the event saturated the 1-bit digitizers of the filterbank and it was easily visible in three of the thirteen beams. At the time, this was interpreted as a celestial event, with dispersion measure (DM) of 375 pc/cc. Subsequent discoveries of dispersed events in all 13 beams of the receiver (dubbed the Perytons) by Burke-Spolaor et al. (2011) at similar dispersion led to a loss of interest in the Lorimer burst, and it was postulated to have had a terrestrial origin. When Thornton et al. announced the discovery of a further 4 FRBs, all in solitary beams of the multibeam receiver, and with a wide range of DMs, there was renewed confidence that the FRBs were both celestial and extragalactic. Subsequently more FRBs have been discovered, and at telescopes other than Parkes, but so has the origin of the Parkes Perytons, microwave ovens. In this paper I argue that the only definitive proof that FRBs are at cosmological distances will come from the detection of an FRB with an interferometer and describe an experiment to achieve this with the old Molonglo interferometer. |
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