The impact of FAST on the research of fast radio bursts

作者：Renxin Xu · 发表于：National Science Review · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1093/nsr/nwab204 · 研究领域：Medicine

TheUniverse has never stopped revealing surprises as science and technology develops. The discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is one such surprise, which are mysterious blips or bursts in the radio band, with a duration of a few milliseconds and large dispersionmeasures of extragalactic/cosmological origin. Interestingly, a glint was recorded in Australia’s Parkes 64-m telescope in 2001, but was only announced after six years and generally recognized as a new type of cosmic event (rather than being human-made or from aliens) another six years later. The study of FRBs has become one of the focuses of research, especially after the discovery of the first repeating source, FRB 121102, in 2016. Among numerous radio telescopes, it is worth noting that the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a superb instrument for hunting FRBs, though it was designed to studybaryon acoustic oscillation through mapping of redshifted hydrogen. The CHIME has detected, without doubt, a large number of FRBs due to its unprecedented field of view, but the nature of FRBs is still a matter of debate: are all FRBs repeating? What is the radiative mechanism as well as the physical origin of FRBs? The largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, China’s five-hundred-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST), would be the right tool to solve these problems, taking advantage of its extremely high sensitivity [1]. More and more FRBs, known previously as ‘one-off’ bursts, are i...