0:00 welcome to beond space event at the 0:01 tundra in today's episode we'll talk 0:03 about the so-called fast radio burst one 0:06 of the greatest mysteries of modern 0:08 astrophysics what are they what causes 0:10 them and how to detect them we'll try to 0:12 find out as our next guest is an expert 0:14 in this field zigy pis of the Department 0:17 of physics of the mill University in 0:20 Montreal Canada so everyone please 0:22 welcome zigy plis hi Zi 0:32 can you hear 0:34 me you I think you froze for a little 0:36 bit Yeah H yeah some some problem with 0:39 the connection okay I think it's 0:41 everything is fine right now okay so 0:45 uh some first question is um in general 0:50 what are fast why are they so 0:53 mysterious what is All That Bass about 0:56 about 0:57 them yeah so fast Trader burst were 0:59 first discovered only in 2007 so not too 1:02 long ago and they're very brief flashes 1:04 of radio waves they last about a 1:06 thousand of a second one millisecond and 1:09 from their radio signal We Believe or we 1:12 we can derive that they come from 1:14 outside of our Milky Way so they come 1:15 from different 1:17 galaxies and we now no this for sure 1:19 because some of the fast R burst we were 1:21 able to pinpoint two galaxies so we know 1:23 they are coming from outside of our 1:24 galaxy and because of this distance and 1:27 the short duration must be very 1:29 energetic EV so we know that they 1:31 produce about as much energy in this one 1:33 millisecond as our sun does in 3 days so 1:36 it's a lot of energy and they're 1:38 mysterious because no one really 1:40 expected them and we don't really know 1:41 what produces them so the mystery is 1:43 really figuring out uh what produces the 1:46 fast radio 1:47 burst so uh how many of fast radi burst 1:51 have been detected today 1:53 how what is what is the I don't know 1:56 what is uh the sample of known first r 2:01 yeah so the number of published fast dat 2:03 bir is um uh just over 100 uh over 100 2:13 yeah detected that are still analyzing 2:16 and writing up the results from the 2:19 number of the already published fastr 2:21 bir we can derive we can calculate how 2:24 many of them are on the sky every day 2:26 and we think modern telescopes with 2:28 their sensitivity could detect thousand 2:30 telescopes on the sky every day the 2:32 issue is just that all radio telescopes 2:34 have very limited fields of view so you 2:36 only see a tiny portion of the sky at 2:37 the same time so you'll never be able to 2:39 catch all thousands of them but with 2:42 thousands of them on the sky every day 2:44 it must be a relatively common phenomena 2:46 it cannot be something uh very rare so 2:50 it's like they literally happen every I 2:52 don't know every second every every 2:54 minute right so oh yeah like yeah so uh 3:00 uh what what what do we know uh about 3:03 the origin of 3:06 firstr about the what are the current 3:10 hypthesis 3:11 that can explain their origin their 3:15 nature which one is according to 3:19 you so first of all because of the short 3:22 duration it's only a millisecond that 3:23 means that it must come from a very 3:25 small place which naturally points you 3:27 to compact objects such as neutron star 3:29 or black holes um and there's also some 3:33 exotic examples we do know in in our 3:36 galaxy we have poar which are neutron 3:38 stars that are rapidly spinning and 3:40 produce we see them as uh pulses because 3:44 they spin like a lighthouse and their 3:46 their beam of emission spins around so 3:47 people have proposed maybe it's some 3:49 extra Galactic super Pulsar uh that's 3:53 possible and one very viable candidate 3:57 for the production of burst are magnet 3:59 which are neutron stars also uh with 4:02 with very large magnetic fields and we 4:06 roughly distinguish between magnetars 4:07 and pulsars where magnetars get most of 4:10 their energy from the magnetic field 4:13 where pulsars get most of their energy 4:14 from the rotation and their rotation is 4:16 a little bit less energetic so people 4:19 have have for a long time proposed that 4:22 magnetars might be a good production 4:23 side for fers and recently only last 4:27 year we detected actually an F sh burst 4:30 like signal from a galactic magnetar 4:32 which really strengthens this connection 4:35 um because for a long time people had 4:37 asked oh if magnetar are such a good 4:40 candidate for fast radio burst then 4:41 where are the galactic fast radio burst 4:43 and and then we found them last year so 4:45 this was detected by the chime telescope 4:48 which is a project that I work on and 4:50 also by the stair 2 telescope which is a 4:53 project run out of ctech in the US so 4:56 like the the chime telescope is 4:58 essential for discover FR 5:01 right what can you say something more 5:04 about this instrument this 5:07 facility yeah so I work on a Chim 5:09 telescope and um we we started building 5:14 the experiment in 2016 we started 5:17 observing in 2018 and the real power of 5:20 CH FB is the telescope has a very large 5:23 field of view so we basically can see um 5:28 120 degrees of the sky at the same time 5:32 which is just and that's paired with a 5:34 large sensitivity which means that we 5:36 have the highest detection rate of all 5:38 current ongoing fast radio burst surveys 5:42 means we detect a few a day um and this 5:45 way we can gather a large sample of fast 5:47 video bur so so I said at the start 5:50 there's about 100 published so far um 5:53 but we are um increasing the sample by a 5:56 lot and the added benefit of that is all 5:59 of our fast radio bursts are detected by 6:01 the same telescope um so that makes it 6:03 easier to compare different fast radi 6:05 bursts with each other because they're 6:06 all um produced by the same selection 6:09 function like it's always hard to 6:11 compare a signal that's detected by 6:13 different telescopes because they have 6:14 different sensitivities Different 6:16 instrumental effects but all of the fast 6:18 radio burst from chime they can be 6:20 easily compared with each other okay um 6:24 now I want to focus on your latest 6:26 research regarding the first FR words 6:28 you have recently discovered that those 6:31 FR frps had lower 6:33 frequencies than ever before right MH 6:37 yeah that's right yeah so one of the um 6:40 one of the unknowns for f radio burst is 6:42 um is exactly what frequency coverage 6:45 they have uh and that's because most 6:47 searches for fast vurst are conducted 6:49 around 1.4 gahz which is where most 6:52 radio telescopes are tuned at and then 6:55 chime is tuned between 400 and 800 MHz 6:58 so that's where we now have a large 7:00 sample of fastr burst but we really want 7:02 to know how low do they go in terms of 7:04 their frequencies and how high do they 7:06 go so in this particular case we were 7:08 using the loar telescope in the 7:10 Netherlands which doesn't look like a 7:12 telescope at all if you Google it it's a 7:14 bunch of antenna in in a field uh but 7:17 it's very powerful and so what we did is 7:20 we used loar and we pointed it at a 7:22 location of a known repeating source of 7:24 fos burst so we haven't talked much 7:26 about this so far but we we do know that 7:29 at least 24 sources of fast R burst 7:31 repeat which makes it easier to follow 7:34 up observ to do follow-up observations 7:36 so we pointed low far to the known 7:39 location of a fast radi burst Source uh 7:42 in the hope of catching any burst and we 7:44 did eventually we catched the quite a 7:48 lot of them and this shows that the 7:50 emission of the fast Rader burst goes 7:51 down all the way to 110 MHz which is the 7:54 bottom of the loar band so we can't go 7:56 lower lower with the current 7:58 observations 7:59 but what it tells us is that 8:02 um first of all that the the whatever 8:06 produces the phosphat burst must be able 8:07 to produce these frequencies of light uh 8:10 and more importantly because I don't 8:12 think that was much of a surprise more 8:13 importantly is that those frequencies 8:15 actually got out of the system so um 8:18 people have thought there's some 8:20 production site for fast V burst can be 8:22 magnetar or some other neutron star or a 8:24 black hole um but then there's so much 8:26 material around this magnetar that it 8:29 will absorb all of the fast radio burst 8:32 emission and low frequencies right away 8:34 um which is something we we know happens 8:37 in the universe so what this means is 8:39 because we can see the low frequency 8:41 emission it means that the environment 8:43 of the fast FAO burst must be relatively 8:45 clean there can be so much material 8:48 around it which is then a very important 8:50 constraint for theorists to work with 8:53 because whatever model they come up with 8:54 from Fast radio burst it cannot be very 8:57 messy environment and what I mean by a 9:00 messy environment one example would be a 9:02 very young Supernova Remnant if a star 9:05 go supernova it explodes it leaves a lot 9:07 of debris around and some some 9:11 environment like that would absorb a lot 9:12 of low frequency 9:14 emission okay uh Ziggy uh we'll be 9:17 wrapping out this interview thank you so 9:19 much for your interesting lecture and 9:22 for the information you have provided um 9:25 it was a pleasure to host you on our 9:27 event thank you so much and good luck 9:29 with your 9:30 research thank you yeah thank you very 9:32 much yeah you're very welcome have a 9:33 good day have a good day