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.

半个多世纪前射电脉冲星的发现是天文学的一个开创性时刻。它证明了中子星的存在，为研究中子星提供了强大的观测工具，并使我们能够探测强引力、致密物质和星际介质。最近，脉冲星巡天偶然发现了快速射电爆发（FRB）。虽然快速射电暴看起来与脉冲星的单个脉冲相似，但它们的大色散延迟表明它们起源于银河系之外很远的地方，因此亮度要高出许多数量级。虽然大多数快速射电暴似乎是一次性的，也许是灾难性的事件，但现在已知有两个来源会重复发生，因此显然有一个寿命更长的中央引擎。除了了解它们是如何产生的之外，还有可能使用快速射电暴（就像脉冲星一样）来探测宇宙的极端以及其他看不见的介入介质。此类研究将得到高隐含的全天空事件发生率的帮助：大约每分钟在天空的某个地方就会发生一次可检测到的快速射电暴。事实上，过去十年中发现的快速射电暴源不足一百个，这很大程度上是由于当前射电望远镜的视场较小。然而，新一代广域仪器现已上线，它们将能够每天检测多个快速射电暴。因此，我们正处于短时射电暂态相空间进一步突破的边缘，这对于区分许多提出的快速射电暴起源理论至关重要。在这篇综述中，我们以进入该领域的天文学家可以理解的水平提供了观测和理论介绍。