Details on the event

01/09/2018

Special Talk

Localizing Fast Radio Bursts and unveiling their extreme environments

Benito Marcote (EVN Support Scientist, Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE), Netherlands)

Wednesday 30/01/2019 @ 15:00, Sala riunioni II piano ex-IASF (Area della Ricerca CNR)

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are radio transient sources that emit a single pulse with a duration of only a few milliseconds. They were firstly discovered in 2007, and nowadays we have detected tens of these events using single-dish radio observatories. Only one FRB has been precisely localized, FRB 121102, the only one known to repeat until 2019 (in January a second one was reported). In this talk I will explain these objects, focusing on the results obtained during the localization of FRB 121102. We show that the bursts are coincident with a persistent and compact radio source located inside a low-metallicity star-forming dwarf galaxy. These results, together with the discovery of a surprisingly high Faraday rotation measure in the burst emission, point to an extreme environment for FRB 121102, where the most plausible scenarios are young magnetars inside a superluminous supernova or interacting with a massive black hole. The new facilities with dedicated FRB searches are expected to produce tens of localizations during these years, finally unveiling the nature of these systems and verifying if the properties observed in FRB 121102 are common to the whole population of FRBs or it is a particular case.