Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a newly discovered astrophysical phenomenon consisting of short (few ms) bursts of radio waves. FRBs occur roughly 1000 times per sky per day. From their dispersion measures, these events are clearly extragalactic and possibly generally at cosmological distances. One FRB is known to repeat and indeed has been localized to a dwarf galaxy at redshift 0.2. Nevertheless, the origin of FRBs, whether repeating or not, is presently unknown. In this talk I will review FRB properties as well as highlight efforts to find FRBs, including a new Canadian radio telescope, CHIME, that is predicted to make major progress on the FRB problem.