Dr. Manisha Caleb (University of Sydney)

Manisha Caleb Colloquium: Exploring the transient landscape with MeerKAT

Marsfeld

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have a story which has been told and retold many times over the past few years as they have sparked excitement and controversy since the pioneering discovery in 2007. The FRB class encompasses a number of microsecond-millisecond duration pulses occurring at Galactic to cosmological distances with energies spanning several orders of magnitude. While most FRBs have been observed as singular events, a small fraction of them have been observed to repeat over various timescales leading to an apparent dichotomy in the population. Though ~50 progenitor model theories have been proposed with the majority involving neutron stars, no consensus has emerged for their origin(s). However, with the discovery of an FRB-like pulse from the Galactic magnetar SGR J1935+2154, magnetar engine models appear to be the current leading favourite. In this talk, I will present an overview of the field of FRBs and the recent results from the MeerTRAP project at the MeerKAT radio telescope.