The discovery and significance of fast radio bursts

TL;DR

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief, intense radio signals of cosmological origin, with thousands known, but their exact sources and mechanisms remain largely unknown, prompting ongoing research and discovery.

Contribution

This paper reviews the discovery, key developments, and open questions in the study of FRBs, highlighting the progress made over the past decade.

Findings

FRBs are millisecond-duration radio bursts from cosmological distances.

Multiple FRBs, including repeating sources, have been identified.

The origins and mechanisms of FRBs are still not well understood.

Abstract

In 2007 we were part of a team that discovered the so-called ``Lorimer Burst'', the first example of a new class of objects now known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). These enigmatic events are only a few ms in duration and occur at random locations on the sky at a rate of a few thousand per day. Several thousand FRBs are currently known. While it is now well established that they have a cosmological origin, and about 10\% of all currently known sources have been seen to exhibit multiple bursts, the origins of these enigmatic sources are currently poorly understood. In this article, we review the discovery of FRBs and present some of the highlights from the vast body of work by an international community. Following a brief overview of the scale of the visible Universe in \S 1, we describe the key moments in radio astronomy (\S 2) that led up to the discovery of the Lorimer burst (\S 3). Early efforts to find more FRBs are described in \S 4 which led to the discovery of the first repeating source (\S 5). In \S 6, as we close out on the second decade of FRBs, we outline some of the many open questions in the field and look ahead to the coming years where many surprises are surely in store.