Space Sciences/Astrophysics Seminar with Aaron Pearlman on Fast Radio Bursts

Aaron Pearlman (Hosted by Yajie Yuan) from McGill University will be presenting the seminar on "Fast Radio Bursts: Illuminating their Origins in the Era of Wide-Field Radio Telescopes"

Pearlman is a Banting Prize Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill Space Institute Fellow, and FRQNT Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and the Trottier Space Institute at McGill. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are highly energetic, short-duration radio flashes that emanate from astrophysical objects located at cosmological distances. The high all-sky FRB rate (hundreds per sky per day) suggests FRBs are produced by a common phenomenon in the Universe. However, their precise origins are currently unknown. The radio signals from FRBs encode valuable information about the intervening material through which they propagate, making them unique probes of the diffuse matter between stars and galaxies, as well as the distribution of ionized baryons in the cosmic web.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of our current understanding of the enigmatic FRB phenomenon and highlight recent progress in the field enabled by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a wide-field digital transit radio telescope that is being used as part of the CHIME/FRB project to detect ~1,000 new FRBs each year. I will also present new results from a simultaneous X-ray and radio observational campaign targeting nearby repeating FRBs, with a focus on FRB 20200120E—the closest known extragalactic FRB, which resides in an ~10-Gyr-old globular cluster within the M81 galactic system and is serving as a Rosetta Stone for understanding the nature of a possibly exotic FRB source. Finally, I will give an update on the current status of the CHIME/FRB Outriggers project—a new very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment that will precisely localize thousands of CHIME-detected FRBs on the sky with ~50 milliarcsecond precision over the next few years, which will enable unprecedented studies of a large sample of FRB host galaxies and local environments and propel the field of FRB cosmology to new heights.

Sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.