Local Circumnuclear Magnetar Solution to Extragalactic Fast Radio Bursts

Pen, Ue-Li; Connor, Liam

doi:10.1088/0004-637x/807/2/179

Cited by 117 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(31 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, the bursts from FRB 121102 show a wide range of spectral shapes that appear to be predominantly intrinsic to the source and which vary on timescales of minutes or shorter. While there may be multiple physical origins for the population of fast radio bursts, the repeat bursts with high dispersion measure and variable spectra specifically seen from FRB 121102 support models that propose an origin in a young, highly magnetised, extragalactic neutron star 11,12 .2 FRB 121102 was discovered 4 in the PALFA survey, a deep search of the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz for radio pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs) using the 305-m William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory and the 7-beam Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA) 13,14 . The observed dispersion measure (DM) of the burst is roughly three times the maximum value expected along this line of sight in the NE2001 model 15 of Galactic electron density, i.e.…”

mentioning

confidence: 67%

mentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Repeated powerful radiative bursts are associated with magnetars, and indeed giant flares from the latter have been suggested as a FRB source 12,19,24 . However, no Galactic magnetar has been seen to emit more than a single giant flare in over four decades of monitoring, arguing against a magnetar giant flare origin for FRB 121102.…”

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confidence: 99%

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A repeating fast radio burst

Spitler

Scholz

Hessels

et al. 2016

Nature

884

933

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Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration astronomical radio pulses of unknown physical origin that appear to come from extragalactic distances [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] . Previous follow-up observations have failed to find additional bursts at the same dispersion measures (i.e. integrated column density of free electrons between source and telescope) and sky position as the original detections 9 . The apparent non-repeating nature of the fast radio bursts has led several authors to hypothesise that they originate in cataclysmic astrophysical events 10 . Here we report the detection of ten additional bursts from the direction of FRB 121102, using the 305-m Arecibo telescope. These new bursts have dispersion measures and sky positions consistent with the original burst 4 . This unambiguously identifies FRB 121102 as repeating and demonstrates that its source survives the energetic events that cause the bursts. Additionally, the bursts from FRB 121102 show a wide range of spectral shapes that appear to be predominantly intrinsic to the source and which vary on timescales of minutes or shorter. While there may be multiple physical origins for the population of fast radio bursts, the repeat bursts with high dispersion measure and variable spectra specifically seen from FRB 121102 support models that propose an origin in a young, highly magnetised, extragalactic neutron star 11,12 .2 FRB 121102 was discovered 4 in the PALFA survey, a deep search of the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz for radio pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs) using the 305-m William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory and the 7-beam Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA) 13,14 . The observed dispersion measure (DM) of the burst is roughly three times the maximum value expected along this line of sight in the NE2001 model 15 of Galactic electron density, i.e. β DM ≡ DM FRB /DM Gal Max ∼ 3, suggesting an extragalactic origin.Initial Arecibo follow-up observations were limited in both dwell time and sky coverage and resulted in no detection of additional bursts 4 . In 2015 May and June we carried out more extensive follow-up using Arecibo, covering a ∼ 9 radius with a grid of six ALFA pointings around the then-best sky position of FRB 121102 (Figure 1 and Extended Data Table 1 and 2). As described in the Methods, high-time-resolution, total intensity spectra were recorded, and the data were processed using standard radio-frequency interference (RFI) excision, dispersion removal, and single-pulse-search algorithms implemented in the PRESTO software suite and associated data reduction pipelines 14,16,17 .We detected 10 additional bursts from FRB 121102 in these observations. The burst properties, and those of the initial FRB 121102 burst, are listed in Table 1. The burst intensities are shown in Figure 2. No other periodic or single-pulse signals of a plausible astrophysical origin were detected at any other DM. Until the source's physical nature is clear, we continue to refer to it as FRB 121102 and label each burst chronologically starting with the o...

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confidence: 67%

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confidence: 67%

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A repeating fast radio burst

Spitler

Scholz

Hessels

et al. 2016

Nature

884

933

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“…It is also conceivable to have an extremely young and energetic pulsar and/or magnetar near to an AGN (Pen & Connor 2015;Cordes & Wasserman 2016) -either interacting or not.…”

Section: Agn/accreting Black Holementioning

confidence: 99%

The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales

Marcote

Paragi

Hessels

et al. 2017

ApJL

368

434

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The millisecond-duration radio flashes known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) represent an enigmatic astrophysical phenomenon. Recently, the sub-arcsecond localization (∼100 mas precision) of FRB121102 using the Very Large Array has led to its unambiguous association with persistent radio and optical counterparts, and to the identification of its host galaxy. However, an even more precise localization is needed in order to probe the direct physical relationship between the millisecond bursts themselves and the associated persistent emission. Here, we report very-long-baseline radio interferometric observations using the European VLBI Network and the 305 m Arecibo telescope, which simultaneously detect both the bursts and the persistent radio emission at milliarcsecond angular scales and show that they are co-located to within a projected linear separation of 40 pc (12 mas angular separation, at 95% confidence). We detect consistent angular broadening of the bursts and persistent radio source (∼2-4 mas at 1.7 GHz), which are both similar to the expected Milky Way scattering contribution. The persistent radio source has a projected size constrained to be  0.7 pc (0.2 mas angular extent at 5.0 GHz) and a lower limit for the brightness temperature of T 5 10 K b 7´. Together, these observations provide strong evidence for a direct physical link between FRB121102 and the compact persistent radio source. We argue that a burst source associated with a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus or a young neutron star energizing a supernova remnant are the two scenarios for FRB121102 that best match the observed data.

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“…Nevertheless, there has been no astrophysical object or progenitor event definitively connected to FRBs, which has inspired a large number of theoretical studies to solve the mystery of identifying their progenitor. This includes magnetized neutron stars (NSs) collapsing to black holes (Falcke & Rezzolla 2014), asteroids and comets falling onto NSs (Geng & Huang 2015;Dai et al 2016), radio flares related to soft gamma-ray repeaters (Lyutikov 2002;Popov & Postnov 2010;Kulkarni et al 2014Kulkarni et al , 2015Lyubarsky 2014;Katz 2016b), giants pulses from young pulsars (Cordes & Wasserman 2016;Connor et al 2016;Lyutikov et al 2016;Popov & Pshirkov 2016), circumnuclear magnetars (Pen & Connor 2015), flaring stars (Loeb et al 2014), merging charged black holes (Zhang 2016), white dwarf mergers (Kashiyama et al 2013), and magnetic NS mergers (Hansen & Lyutikov 2001;Piro 2012;Wang et al 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

What if the Fast Radio Bursts 110220 and 140514 Are from the Same Source?

Piro¹,

Burke-Spolaor²

2017

ApJL

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The fast radio bursts (FRBs) 110220 and 140514 were detected at telescope pointing locations within 9 arcmin of each other over three years apart, both within the same 14.4 arcmin beam of the Parkes radio telescope. Nevertheless, they generally have not been considered to be from the same source because of a vastly different dispersion measure (DM) for the two bursts by over 380 pc cm −3 . Here we consider the hypothesis that these two FRBs are from the same neutron star embedded within a supernova remnant (SNR) that provides an evolving DM as the ejecta expands and becomes more diffuse. Using such a model and the observed DM change, it can be argued that the corresponding SN must have occurred within ≈ 10.2 years of FRB 110220. Furthermore, constraints can be placed on the SN ejecta mass and explosion energy, which appear to require a stripped envelope (Type Ib/c) SN and/or a very energetic explosion. A third FRB from this location would be even more constraining, allowing the component of the DM due to the SNR to be separated from the unchanging DM components due to the host galaxy and intergalactic medium. In the future, if more FRBs are found to repeat, the sort of arguments presented here can be used to test the young neutron star progenitor hypothesis for FRBs.

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Local Circumnuclear Magnetar Solution to Extragalactic Fast Radio Bursts

Cited by 117 publications

References 26 publications

A repeating fast radio burst

A repeating fast radio burst

The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales

What if the Fast Radio Bursts 110220 and 140514 Are from the Same Source?

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