Parkes observations for project P1343 semester 2025APRS_08

Full description

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio bursts of extragalactic origin. Since the discovery of the first FRB in the archival Parkes/Murriyang multibeam data, a broad dichotomy in population has emerged. Some FRBs have been seen to be repeating, while others are not, despite a significant amount of follow-up using different radio telescopes. The commissioning of new dedicated FRB detection systems has led to an exponential increase in the detected FRBs over the last decade. Despite >700 FRBs published to date, there is still a lack of understanding about the physical mechanisms through which FRB emission is produced. Due to the possibility of detecting multiple bursts from the same source in a repeating FRB, it forms an ideal sample set to uncover the physics of the source (e.g., emission mechanism, progenitor surrounding media), and test possible progenitor models. The coherent upgrade to the FRB detection system to ASKAP is expected to detect ~1-2 FRB/week. However, due to the limited fractional bandwidth available with ASKAP and survey nature of the telescope, probing the spectro-polarimetric characteristics of repeating sources is non-optimal. Hence, the large bandwidth offered by the ultra wideband-low (UWL) on Parkes/Murriyang is an ideal instrument to follow-up repeating FRB sources discovered through CRACO. Over the next ~6 months, we expect to double the number of repeaters that have been studied through the UWL. This will provide unprecedented insight into the progenitor environment and the surrounding media of repeating FRBs. We propose using the UWL to follow up repeater-like sources to study their wideband spectro-polarimetric characteristics.