Transcending RRATs: Unidentified Extragalactic Radio Bursts

We will discuss the recent paper by Thornton et al. "A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances (Science, 2013, 341, 53) that reports the discovery of single, millisecond radio bursts from four objects. We will the discuss the context of this work in terms of previous announcements of extragalactic radio bursts. While the recently discovered bursts are almost certainly from extragalactic sources, the distances and energy requirements are highly uncertain. However, the detection statistics support the estimate that 10^4 similar bursts occur every day with an isotropic distribution. We will discuss detection of a similar burst in a pulsar survey using the Arecibo telescope (the first detection with an instrument other than the Parkes telescope in Australia) and the prospects for localizing bursts using fast-sampled imaging surveys using interferometers. We will also discuss types of sources that can account for the bursts and the value of the bursts for probing the intergalactic medium.