Speaker
Description
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, extragalactic radio transients of unknown origin. The FRB backend on the CHIME telescope (CHIME/FRB) is the most prolific FRB discovery machine, having detected more than 4000 unique sources of FRBs. The recent addition of three CHIME Outrigger stations across Northern America enables the precise sub-arcsecond localization of multiple FRBs per week. This in turn enables robust host galaxy identification which unlocks exciting prospects for FRB science, two of which I will discuss. Firstly, by precisely pinpointing bursts to their galactic environments, source models can be constrained since different sources tend to be linked to specific galactic environments. Secondly, it allows for FRBs to be used as probes of the material between the source and observer, since spectroscopic redshifts (distances) become accessible once a host is robustly identified. Currently, the Outriggers are capable of achieving localisation precision of approximately 50 milliarcseconds, and ongoing work aims to push this further. I will review some of the major findings of the Outriggers thus far and describe some of the work being done to further improve localization precision. This includes validating astrometric positions of VLBI calibrators (radio bright active galactic nuclei) at the low operating frequencies of CHIME/FRB (400-800 MHz), where source structure and core-shift of these AGN can introduce localisation offsets. I will also present some of our efforts to use the Outriggers to localise bursts from known repeating FRBs that have previously been localised by the European VLBI Network to (tens-of-)milliarcsecond precision, in order to validate our astrometric pipeline and search for systematic offsets.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 3 |
|---|---|
| PhD relevance | NA |
