Dr. Maxim Lyutikov -- How do you make a Fast Radio Burst?
Some things happen out in the universe that are too powerful to make in a lab. Other phenomena are so coherent and well-ordered, we can't figure out how they can be made without a lab! Fast radio bursts are an incomprehensible combination of both; they are extremely powerful, highly coherent, and very rapid bursts of radio emission. Dr. Maxim Lyutikov spends a lot of his time pondering how these bursts could possibly be made, and all the data seems to point to the most extreme physics imaginable: neutron stars at the highest densities we can imagine, with extremely strong gravity and with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.