A giant glitch from the magnetar SGR J1935+2154 before FRB 200428

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are short pulses observed in radio frequencies usually originating from cosmological distances. The discovery of FRB 200428 and its X-ray counterpart from the Galactic magnetar SGR J1935+2154 suggests that at least some FRBs can be generated by magnetars. However, the majority of X-ray bursts from magnetars are not associated with radio emission. The fact that only in rare cases can an FRB be generated raises the question regarding the special triggering mechanism of FRBs. Here we report a giant glitch from SGR J1935+2154, which occurred approximately 3.1±2.5 day before FRB 200428, with ∆ν = 19.8 ± 1.4 µHz and ∆ ν = 6.3 ± 1.1 pHz s −1 . The corresponding spindown power change rate ∆ ν/ ν is among the largest in all the detected pulsar glitches. The glitch contains a delayed spin-up process that is only detected in the Crab pulsar and the magnetar 1E 2259+586, a large persistent offset of the spin-down rate, and a recovery component which is about one order of magnitude smaller than the persistent one. The temporal coincidence between the glitch and FRB 200428 suggests a physical connection between the two. The internally triggered giant glitch of the magnetar likely altered the magnetosphere structure dramatically in favour of FRB generation, which subsequently triggered many X-ray bursts and eventually FRB 200428 through additional crustal cracking and Alfvén wave excitation and propagation.

Finding the Particularity of the Active Episode of SGR J1935+2154 during Which FRB 20200428 Occurred: Implication from Statistics of Fermi/GBM X-Ray Bursts

“…Such a situation could appear in the global activity of a magnetar due to a conversion of the magnetic field from a dipolar to a multipolar configuration (e.g., the situation considered in Yang & Zhang 2021). Here, it is interesting to mention that a giant glitch occurred approximately 3 days before FRB 20200428, as reported recently by Ge et al (2022). The occurrence of the glitch means the magnetar crust had just obtained a sudden increase of the angular momentum, which could have been transferred from the core of the magnetar.…”

“…On 2020 April 28, from the direction of a Galactic magnetar, SGR J1935+2154, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) captured a fast radio burst (FRB) emission (Bochenek et al 2020;CHIME/FRB Collaboration et al 2020), which was precisely temporally associated with an X-ray burst (XRB; Li et al 2021Li et al , 2022aGe et al 2022). This magnetar had just entered an active state of XRB about half a month before FRB 20200428 occurred (Barthelmy et al 2020;Lin et al 2020a;Mereghetti et al 2020;Ridnaia et al 2020Ridnaia et al , 2021Tavani et al 2020;Veres et al 2020;Younes et al 2020;Kaneko et al 2021;Li et al 2021;Cai et al 2022aCai et al , 2022b and remained active at other times as well (Israel et al 2016;Lin et al 2020b;Borghese et al 2022;Xie et al 2022;Rehan & Ibrahim 2023;Xie et al 2023).…”

Burst Phase Distribution of SGR J1935+2154 Based on Insight-HXMT

“…Also because the long time span of our study, none of the existing ephemeris can fully cover all the bursts. The ephemeris used in this paper is fitted results based on the combined ephemeris evolution data derived from NuSTAR, NICER and XMM-Newton in (Ge et al 2022), which yield f = 0.30794447(1) Hz,  f 2.165 10 Hzs 12 1…”

A Comparative Analysis of Scale-invariant Phenomena in Repeating Fast Radio Bursts and Glitching Pulsars

“…Subsequently, three FRB-like radio bursts emitted from SGR J1935+2154 were detected by the CHIME/ FRB system on 2020 October 8 (Good & Chime/Frb Collaboration 2020). More surprisingly, Ge et al (2022) utilized the observations from NICER, NuSTAR, Chandra, and XMM-Newton to study the timing properties of SGR J1935 +2154 around the epoch of FRB 20200428, and reported that a giant spin-up glitch with Δν = 19.8 ± 1.4 μHz occurred approximately 3.1 ± 2.5 day before FRB 20200428.…”