Mysterious fast radio bursts and the new radio telescope in Taiwan: BURSTT
Speaker: Tetsuya Hashimoto
Abstract:
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious coherent radio pulses with millisecond timescales, most of which emerge from galaxies at cosmological distances. Uncovering the origin of FRBs is one of the central foci in astronomy. However, their origin is yet to be known due to the major observational challenge of FRBs: when and where they happen in the sky are unknown. Bustling Universe Radio Survey Telescope in Taiwan (BURSTT) is a new radio array dedicated to detecting mysterious FRBs in the nearby Universe. Within a few years, BURSTT will overcome this observational challenge with its unique capabilities of nearly all-sky monitoring (10,000 deg2) and accurate localization (< 1 arcsec), and none of the current FRB facilities have both of these capabilities. In this presentation, I will summarize the expected science cases with unique FRB samples of BURSTT. In contrast to the current FRB facilities, BURSTT will observe the same sky as multi-messenger instruments, including gravitational waves and neutrinos. This BURSTT’s design will maximize the chance of the simultaneous detection of multi-messengers or multi-wavelength counterparts, which would strongly constrain the FRB progenitor scenarios. BURSTT will provide a unique window into FRB applications from environments, progenitors, to cosmology.