by Simon Johnston (CASS)

Can interstellar scintillation explain the deficit of Fast Radio Bursts FRBs) at low Galactic latitudes ? A paper just accepted by Macquart and Johnston ( astro-ph/1505.05893 ) finds that the event rate of FRBs located off the Galactic plane may be enhanced by a factor ~30-300% relative to objects near the Galactic plane.

The figure shows how scintillation draws out the underlying distribution (dashed line) to both high and low flux values, but also crucially that it enhances the flux density even at median values. This enhancement preferentially occurs at high Galactic latitudes leading to more detections than at low latitudes.