Astronomy Tea Talk

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has discovered thousands of fast radio bursts (FRBs) to date. The extremely high all-sky rate of FRBs implies that they have the potential to become
powerful cosmological probes. The key to unlocking this potential is our ability to localize FRBs to their host galaxies. I will discuss the CHIME Outriggers project: a widefield, blind VLBI survey dedicated to localizing thousands of FRBs, and important milestones towards realizing this ambitious project, such as the localization of a one-off FRB using VLBI. Finally, I will discuss a time-domain search for gravitationally-lensed FRBs using "gravitational-lens interferometry", as a first application of FRBs to cosmology by constraining primordial black holes. I will conclude by discussing ways to make headway in the field of FRB lensing.