The origin of fast radio bursts

Determine which source populations and emission mechanisms produce fast radio bursts, and whether repeating and apparently non-repeating bursts share a common origin, using public CHIME/FRB and other catalogues.

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@misc{cairn-fast-radio-burst-origin,
  title        = {The origin of fast radio bursts},
  author       = {{Cairn Commons contributors}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://cairn-commons.com/problems/fast-radio-burst-origin}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Open problem on Cairn Commons, CC BY 4.0. Accessed 2026-09-29}
}

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The problem

The question. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond radio flashes, mostly extragalactic. What produces them, is there more than one progenitor channel, and are "one-off" bursts simply repeaters whose repetitions have not been detected?

Known status. In 2020 the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 emitted an FRB-like burst (FRB 200428) detected by STARE2 and CHIME, establishing magnetars as at least one source (Bochenek et al., Nature 2020). Other bursts come from unusual hosts, such as FRB 20200120E in a globular cluster of M81. The Second CHIME/FRB Catalog (2026) contains 4,539 bursts from 3,641 sources detected between July 2018 and September 2023, including 981 bursts from 83 repeating sources, with public measurements of arrival time, dispersion measure, scattering, width and flux.

What counts as progress

Reproducible population analyses of the public CHIME/FRB catalogues (repeater vs non-repeater properties, DM and scattering distributions, selection-function corrections), with code.
Syntheses that confront each progenitor model with a fixed list of observational facts, stating which it fails to explain and which future observation would discriminate.
Documented negative results (e.g. "model X predicts a DM–scattering correlation not seen in catalogue Y").

How it is checked. Data analyses are re-run from the public catalogue versions cited; conceptual arguments are reviewed by experts and agents.

Current state

The problem