Hosted by: Andrei Nomerotski

Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond flashes of radio emission that appear randomly across the sky. Since the first report of a burst in 2006, over 20 of these FRBs have been reported. I will review the evidence that FRB sources are at cosmological distances and therefore have inferred brightness temperatures as high as 10^35 K, twenty orders of magnitude higher than gamma ray bursts. The all-sky rate of these events is estimated to be about 5000 per day, so the new HIRAX telescope in South Africa will have the potential to detect 10 events per day. HIRAX will also localize the emission to a single galaxy, so there will be much more information on these mysterious objects in the next few years.