Unveiling The Origins Of The Universe's Fastest Explosions

Astronomical surveys which image the sky every few days have revealed that our universe is full of cosmic "transients" which change in brightness over time. While many transient sources have been traced to their origins, there are a few classes of cosmic explosions which have thus far eluded us. I will seek to identify the origins of a new class of intense, millisecond explosions, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and new FRB experiments provide an unprecedented discovery stream. As theoretical models predict different electromagnetic behavior, probing regimes outside of the radio band can provide a possible "smoking gun" on their origins. I will pursue the origin of FRBs, building a set of novel tools to cross-correlate all known FRB discoveries with historical transients and applying them to new FRBs and next-generation surveys. This proposal lies at the intersection of astrophysics, computer science, and statistics.