May 1
Tracing Fast Radio Burst Origins through Their Environments and Counterparts
Speaker: Yuxin (Vic) Dong, Northwestern University, PhD Candidate
Abstract: Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are energetic, extragalactic transients whose physical origins remain unknown. Following the association of a Galactic magnetar with an FRB, magnetars have emerged as leading progenitor candidates for at least a subset of the population. Multi-wavelength studies of FRB host galaxies, on galactic and sub-galactic scales, provide key constraints on their formation pathways. In this talk, I will review recent progress in using host environments and persistent radio counterparts as probes of FRB progenitors. I will also present a framework for directly testing the FRB progenitor model by cross-matching optical transients with well-localized FRBs, and discuss its application to the upcoming era of thousands of VLBI-localized FRBs and Rubin/LSST optical transients. By enabling population-level host studies and sensitive searches for multi-wavelength counterparts, these efforts will transform environmental measurements into robust constraints on FRB origins.
Host: Jillian Rastinejad, & Robert Stein