Fast Radio Bursts

Fast radio bursts are a new population of bright, short-duration bursts detected by radio telescopes at 1.4 GHz. Their observational properties suggest that fast radio bursts originate from extragalactic sources and possibly even from cosmologically significant distances. The astrophysical origin of these bursts is still highly uncertain. And although we believe that roughly 10,000 fast radio bursts occur each day over the entire sky, fewer than twenty have been detected. I will give an overview of the observational properties of fast radio bursts and describe the work being done to expand our understanding of the phenomenon.