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Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are short timescale (usec to msec) transients occurring thousands of times daily on the radio sky. First discovered at Parkes in archival data, they have led to wide ranging research and intense search programs at multiple telescopes around the globe. In this talk I’ll concentrate on FRB search programs at three facilities in Australia -- Parkes, Molonglo and ASKAP. Parkes made the first detection and was used to provide initial estimates of the event rates and brightnesses of FRBs, and the distribution of their "dispersion measures" (indicating they are likely originating well beyond the Milky Way). We used Molonglo to validate the celestial origin of FRBs and make the first live-detections using machine learning -- opening up 100x higher-detail studies of FRB burst properties. We are currently operating an FRB search program at ASKAP, which allows localisation of individual FRBs to their host galaxies, estimates of their intrinsic luminosities, pointers to FRB progenitors, and measurement of the baryon density of the Universe, amongst other applications. Finally I’ll report on our significantly improved sensitivity upgrade at ASKAP -- the CRACO FRB search experiment. |
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