Veni, vidi, vici

© ASTRON

In the last decade, a new type of transient termed a `fast radio burst’ (FRB) has been discovered. Though the FRB phenomenon remains mysterious, astronomers have demonstrated that these millisecond-duration flashes of radio light originate from distant galaxies. Whatever is producing the FRBs is thus exceptionally energetic and unlike anything we have studied before. The FRBs therefore hold great scientific promise to give us new insights into the extremes of the Universe. They are also a unique tool to probe the otherwise invisible material within and between galaxies.

Recently I have been awarded an NWO Vici grant for the proposal ``AstroFlash: probing the extremes of the Universe at high time and spatial resolution''. In AstroFlash I will build a team to precisely localise and characterise FRBs and other extreme astrophysical transients using the European VLBI Network. Identifying the host galaxies of FRBs is critical both for understanding their nature as well as using them as astrophysical probes. To date, only 2 repeating FRB sources have been precisely localised - most recently, FRB 180916.J0158+65, which we localised to a relatively nearby spiral galaxy using the EVN (Marcote, Nimmo, Hessels et al. 2020).

When I started at ASTRON in 2008, my research was funded via an NWO Veni grant, which allowed me to make some of the first forays into pulsar science with LOFAR. From 2013-2018 my NWO Vidi project allowed me to build a sizeable research group of PhDs and postdocs at ASTRON and the University of Amsterdam. This group produced a number of exciting pulsar results from Westerbork and LOFAR, as well as important insights into the nature of FRBs. Now I'm looking forward to building up a new group and collaborating closely with Benito Marcote, Zsolt Paragi and others at JIVE.