A Galactic Origin for the Fast Radio Burst FRB010621

Understand

The recent detection of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) has generated strong interest in identifying the origin of these bright, non-repeating, highly dispersed pulses.

• The principal limitation in understanding the origin of these bursts is the lack of reliable distance estimates; their high dispersion measures imply that they may be at cosmological distances ($0.1 < z < 1.0$).
• Here we discuss new distance constraints to the FRB010621 (a.k.a J1852$-$08) first reported by Keane.
• We use velocity resolved $H\alpha$ and $H\beta$ observations of diffuse ionised gas toward the burst to calculate an extinction-corrected emission measure along the line of sight.