Burst 'N' Pulse

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright flashes of radio waves that last only a few milliseconds and are visible across the universe. Although approx 10,000 of these bursts go off every day, they were only discovered by accident in 2007 and their origins remain largely unknown. This means that FRBs are one of the hottest topics in radio astronomy at present. In this talk, James McKee will cover the discovery of this phenomenon, how we have arrived at our current understanding, and what the next few years of radio astronomy holds for this exciting area of astronomy.

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered a repeating radio signal coming from a fixed point in the sky. Could it be aliens? Not this time! She’d discovered a new type of star – the rapidly rotating and highly magnetised pulsar. We will discuss how pulsars were discovered as well how they form, evolve, die and come back to life. We’ll also talk about millisecond pulsars, some of the best clocks in the Universe. Millisecond pulsars can be combined to create pulsar timing arrays, which are used in the search for the distortions in space caused by massive objects known as gravitational waves.