Speaker
Description
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are rapidly becoming unparalleled cosmological tools: the dispersion of these millisecond-duration bursts traces the ionised material along the line of sight, while scattering and Faraday rotation encode the turbulence and magnetic field of intervening media. Nowadays, with more than a hundred FRBs localised to their host galaxies at increasing redshifts, they offer a direct way to test the cosmic baryon census, probe the growth of large-scale structure, and quantify galactic feedback at high redshifts.
The MeerTRAP project was conceived to leverage MeerKAT's high sensitivity and angular resolution to identify radio transients, finding more than ninety FRBs since 2019. When a new bright FRB is detected, 300 ms of raw voltage data are stored, which we use to localise these bursts with arcsecond precision, enabling their study at the highest time and frequency resolution.
In this talk, I will present the most distant FRB sample localised with MeerTRAP, including the first FRB beyond redshift 2. These events push the boundaries of the known FRB population into the cosmic noon, where the IGM contribution to dispersion dominates, and comparisons with cosmological predictions become particularly constraining. By combining redshift information and propagation effects with deep optical and near-infrared surveys, we can disentangle the contributions from the local environment, the IGM, and foreground galaxy halos.
Furthermore, the substantial observing time that MeerKAT dedicates to selected “deep fields” has produced multiple FRB detections along similar sightlines. This allows us to probe the large-scale structure by mapping the baryon distribution of the cosmic web in these directions.
Overall, this high-redshift FRB sample demonstrates that precise localisation and propagation properties of distant bursts can turn FRBs into unprecedented probes of galaxy evolution and cosmology.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 1 |
|---|---|
| Second preference | NOVA Network 3 |
