Astronomy Tea Talk

Fast Radio Bursts are enigmatic extragalactic millisecond radio transients. Many new breakthroughs are now taking place in the field thanks to modern instruments. Apertif (Netherlands) is presently carrying out a time domain survey at 1400 MHz and it is currently one of the leading FRB projects given its large field of view and high sensitivity. In this talk, I will present some of the most important FRB discoveries we have made with Apertif. Since the beginning of the survey in 2019, we have discovered two dozen new FRBs, showing a broad range of propagation effects from which we can infer valuable information about the medium through which they propagate. Some FRBs also display intrinsic structure, useful to determine their emission mechanism. We have also carried out follow up observations of known repeating FRBs. For instance, we have characterized the multi-frequency activity of the periodically repeating FRB20180916B using simultaneous LOFAR observations, and prove that its periodicity cannot be due to winds in a binary system. Apertif thus proves to be a very powerful tool for understanding the origin of FRBs and use them as cosmological probes.