A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are brief radio emissions from distant astronomical sources. Some are known to repeat, but most are single bursts. Non-repeating FRB observations have had insufficient positional accuracy to localize them to an individual host galaxy. We report the interferometric localization of the single pulse FRB 180924 to a position 4 kpc from the center of a luminous galaxy at redshift 0.3214. The burst has not been observed to repeat. The properties of the burst and its host are markedly different from the only other accurately localized FRB source. The integrated electron column density along the line of sight closely matches models of the intergalactic medium, indicating that some FRBs are clean probes of the baryonic component of the cosmic web.Cosmological observations have shown that baryons comprise 4% of the energy density of the Universe, of which only about 10% is in cold gas and stars (1), with the remainder residing in a diffuse plasma surrounding and in between galaxies and galaxy clusters. The location and density of this material has been challenging to characterize, and up to 50% of it remains unaccounted (2).Fast radio bursts (FRBs; ref.(3)) are bright bursts of radio waves with millisecond duration. They can potentially be used to detect, study, and map this medium, as bursts of emission are dispersed and scattered by their 1 arXiv:1906.11476v1 [astro-ph.HE] 27 Jun 2019 dual-polarization beams on the sky using digital beamforming, producing a total field-of-view of ∼ 30 deg 2 . For burst detection, the beamformers produces channelized autocorrelation spectra for both linear polarizations of all beams, with an integration time of 864 µs and channel bandwidth of 1 MHz in these observations. We used 336 channels centered at 1320 MHz. A real-time detection pipeline incoherently adds the spectra from all available antennas (24 antennas in these observations) and polarization channels, then searches (16) the result for dispersed pulses (17).Burst localization is completed with a second data product that utilizes both the amplitude and phase information of the burst radiation. The beamformers store samples of the complex electric field for all beams and both polarizations in a ring buffer of 3.1 s duration, with the oldest data being continuously overwritten by new data. The data are saved for offline interferometric analysis only when the pipeline identifies a candidate. For the searches reported here the triggering required pulses with widths less than 9 ms and S/N > 10.Previous searches with ASKAP used antennas pointed in different directions to maximize sky coverage (10,16). In contrast, our observations used antennas all pointed in the same direction, enabling the array to act as an interferometer capable of sub-arcsecond localization with a 30 deg 2 field of view. We targeted high Galactic latitude fields (Galactic latitude |b| ∼ 50 • ), that had been observed previously (10, 16), and Southern circumpolar fields. The high-latitude fields were observed regularly through 2017 and earl...

The Northern Cross fast radio burst project – I. Overview and pilot observations at 408 MHz

“…A few FRBs have been localized, confirming their extragalactic origin, and their host environments have been found fairly different (Chatterjee et al 2017;Michilli et al 2018;. This scenario seems to indicate that FRBs may not be a single class of events, and significant effort is nowadays undertaken gianni.bernardi@inaf.it to localize more bursts (Bailes et al 2017;Bannister et al 2019;Kocz et al 2019).…”

Luminosity–duration relations and luminosity functions of repeating and non-repeating fast radio bursts

“…In such cases, we adopt the reported duration as an intrinsic duration, w int , instead of our calculation. The spec-z flag is for four FRBs with spectroscopic redshift measured from the host galaxies (FRB 121102, 180916.J0158+65, 180924, and 190523;Tendulkar et al 2017;Marcote et al 2020;Bannister et al 2019;. For these four FRBs we use the spectroscopic redshifts instead of the redshift estimated from the dispersion measure.…”

“…As a conservative estimate, we adopted the highest uncertainty of DM IGM (z), δDM IGM (z), among simulations with different resolutions (Zhu et al 2018). We used spectroscopic redshift instead of DM-derived redshift if available (i.e., FRB121102, 180916.J0158+65, 180924, and 190523: Tendulkar et al 2017;Marcote et al 2020;Bannister et al 2019;). We calculated time-integrated luminosities of FRBs at rest-frame 1.83 GHz by using Eq.…”

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).…”