The discovery of radio pulsars over a half century ago was a seminal moment in astronomy. It demonstrated the existence of neutron stars, gave a powerful observational tool to study them, and has allowed us to probe strong gravity, dense matter, and the interstellar medium. More recently, pulsar surveys have led to the serendipitous discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). While FRBs appear similar to the individual pulses from pulsars, their large dispersive delays suggest that they originate from far outside the Milky Way and hence are many orders-of-magnitude more luminous. While most FRBs appear to be one-off, perhaps cataclysmic events, two sources are now known to repeat and thus clearly have a longer lived central engine. Beyond understanding how they are created, there is also the prospect of using FRBs—as with pulsars—to probe the extremes of the Universe as well as the otherwise invisible intervening medium. Such studies will be aided by the high-implied all-sky event rate: there is a detectable FRB roughly once every minute occurring somewhere on the sky. The fact that less than a hundred FRB sources have been discovered in the last decade is largely due to the small fields-of-view of current radio telescopes. A new generation of wide-field instruments is now coming online, however, and these will be capable of detecting multiple FRBs per day. We are thus on the brink of further breakthroughs in the short-duration radio transient phase space, which will be critical for differentiating between the many proposed theories for the origin of FRBs. In this review, we give an observational and theoretical introduction at a level that is accessible to astronomers entering the field.

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半个多世纪以前，射电脉冲星的发现是天文学的开创性时刻。它证明了中子星的存在，为研究它们提供了有力的观测工具，并允许我们探测强引力，稠密物质和星际介质。最近，脉冲星调查导致偶然发现了快速无线电脉冲串（FRB）。尽管FRB看起来与脉冲星发出的单个脉冲相似，但它们的较大色散延迟表明它们起源于银河系以外的遥远地区，因此发光度高了多个数量级。虽然大多数FRB似乎是一次性的，也许是灾难性事件，但现在已知有两个消息源可以重复，因此显然具有更长寿命的中央引擎。除了了解它们是如何创建的，也有可能使用FRB和脉冲星一起探测宇宙的极端以及其他不可见的中介介质。这些研究将受到高暗示的全天事件发生率的辅助：大约每分钟发生一次可检测到的FRB，发生在天空中的某处。在过去的十年中，发现不到100个FRB信号源的事实很大程度上是由于当前射电望远镜的视场很小。但是，新一代的宽视场仪器现已投入使用，它们将能够每天检测多个FRB。因此，我们正处于短期无线电瞬变相位空间的进一步突破的边缘，这对于区分许多提出的FRB起源理论至关重要。在这篇评论中，