The observed properties of fast radio bursts

Abstract

I present an empirical study of the properties of fast radio bursts (FRBs): Gigahertz-frequency, dispersed pulses of extragalactic origin. I focus my investigation on the sample of seventeen FRBs detected at the Parkes radio telescope with largely self-consistent instrumentation. Of this sample, six are temporally unresolved, eight exhibit evidence for scattering in inhomogeneous plasma, and five display potentially intrinsic temporal structure. The characteristic scattering timescales at a frequency of 1 GHz range between 0.005 ms and 32 ms; moderate evidence exists for a relation between FRB scattering timescales and dispersion measures. Additionally, I present constraints on the fluences of Parkes FRBs, accounting for their uncertain skypositions, and use the multiple-beam detection of FRB 010724 (the Lorimer burst) to measure its fluence to be 800 ± 400 Jy ms. FRBs, including the repeating FRB 121102, appear to manifest with a plethora of characteristics, and it is uncertain at present whether they share a common class of progenitor object, or arise from a selection of independent progenitors.

The prevalence of repeating fast radio bursts

“…The repeating CHIME FRB 180814.J0422+73 was not included in the present analysis despite its low DM X = 102.4 pc cm −3 [8]. This is partly because of the evidence that several properties of the first repeating FRB 121102, some of which (e.g., the observed repetition, and the burst time-frequency structure) are inconsistent with the population of FRBs that have not been observed to repeat 2,29,30 . Additionally, although the DM X of FRB 180814.J0422+73 is lower than that of FRB 180810.J1159+83, the conclusions reached in the main text are independent of its inclusion in the analysis.…”

“…A comparison of the DM X distributions of FRB samples from ASKAP and Parkes suggests that ASKAP is increasingly incomplete at higher values of DM X because of its insensitivity to the faint, high-DM X FRBs observed by Parkes 10 . This effect, together with a possible correlation between FRB temporal widths and DM X [2,9], and additional unknown systematics in the CHIME observations 9 , strongly suggests that CHIME is also increasingly incomplete at higher values of DM X . I mitigate this unknown incompleteness by deriving a lower limit on the FRB rate, R, within a limited volume bounded at d = d limit that contains the lowest-DM X CHIME FRBs.…”

A fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy

“…We modelled the temporal profile of FRB 190523 using methods presented in Ref. 21. The data presented in Figure 1 were formed by the co-!…”

FRB coherent emission from decay of Alfvén waves

“…It is firmly established that at least a few milli-second duration, very bright, radio signals that have been detected between about 400 MHz and 7 GHz (known as Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs) are coming from a distance of about a Gpc or more, eg. Lorimer et al 2007; Thornton et al 2013;Spitler et al 2014;Petroff et al 2016;Bannister et al 2017;Law et al 2017;Chatterjee et al 2017;Marcote et al 2017;Tendulkar et al 2017;Gajjar et al 2018;Michilli et al 2018;Farah et al 2018;Shannon et al 2018;Oslowski et al 2019;Kocz et al 2019;Bannister et al 2019;CHIME Collaboration 2019a and2019b;Ravi 2019aRavi , 2019bRavi et al 2019. Many mechanisms have been suggested for the generation of high luminosity coherent radio waves from Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), eg. Katz (2014Katz ( , 2016, Murase et al (2016;, Kumar et al (2017), Metzger et al (2017), Zhang (2017), Beloborodov (2017), Cordes (2017), Ghisellini & Locatelli (2018), Lu & Kumar (2018), Metzger et al (2019), Thompson (2019), Wang & Lai (2019), ; for a recent review see Katz (2018).…”