"What are FRBs?"

[gemmaanderson]

Rather than trying to identify a catch-all question that allows us to cover all of Australian transient astrophysics, why not go in a different direction and pick something high-impact and specific?

The science question "What are FRBs?" is currently one of the biggest questions in astrophysics. The advantage of asking this question is multifold as answering it requires a huge amount of infrastructure (telescopes, HPC, etc) that is necessary for answering all questions in astrophysics. For example:

• SKA, ASKAP, MWA, Parkes, and a future FRB-dedicated facility are all required for FRB discovery. This provides wide-area radio surveys for a multitude of science cases.
• Smaller radio and optical facilities (VLBI, ATCA, 8m class optical telescopes, etc) are required to follow-up the FRBs to understand what they are. These are the facilities that we need for ALL transient studies.
• SKA, ASKAP, MWA all require HPC infrastructure for data processing.

This is something that politicians can grab onto as a concrete science goal rather than a more nebulous "How do stars die"? They can see we are contributing to one of modern astronomy's biggest questions. Essentially, let's use FRBs to fund ALL of Australian transient astrophysics.

I will also add that while I have an interest in FRBs, they are not my main science (which are GRBs and GWs).

[cwjames1983]

I'm going to note that maybe there's not many comments here because it's so obvious. We've seen time and again that developing instrumentation/capability for one kind of transient helps with another. And the search for the nature of FRBs has already placed extra emphasis back on Galactic magnetars, Crab super-giant pulses, long-period transients, GW events (like they needed any help! ;-) ) and - let's not forget - the motivation to search for once-off bright FRB-like events was motivated by GRBs to begin with (even if Lorimer et al were not actually doing so at the time).