The Host Galaxies and Progenitors of Fast Radio Bursts Localized with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder

By Shivani Bhandari. 2020 XXXIIIrd General Assembly and Scientific Symposium of the International Union of Radio Science, 2020

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope has started to localize fast radio bursts (FRBs) to arcsecond accuracy from the detection of a single pulse, allowing their host galaxies to be reliably identified. We discuss the global properties of the host galaxies of the first four FRBs localized by ASKAP, which lie in the redshift range 0.11 < z < 0.48. All four are massive galaxies (log(M*/M⊙) ∼ 9.4–10.4) with modest star formation rates of up to 2 M⊙ yr−1—very different to the host galaxy of the first repeating FRB 121102, which is a dwarf galaxy with a high specific star formation rate. The FRBs localized by ASKAP typically lie in the outskirts of their host galaxies, which appears to rule out FRB progenitor models that invoke active galactic nuclei or free-floating cosmic strings. The stellar population seen in these host galaxies also disfavors models in which all FRBs arise from young magnetars produced by superluminous supernovae, as proposed for the progenitor of FRB 121102. A range of other progenitor models (including compact-object mergers and magnetars arising from normal core-collapse supernovae) remain plausible.

Subfields: Applied Mathematics, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/091e24cdf5e8d811c3157bc8bd4cf81d1141dcca

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Citations in the corpus

A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, background): “However, FRBs, both repeating and apparently nonrepeating, are found in a variety of types of host galaxies, and it is not yet clear if the two populations are intrinsically different (Bhandari et al. 2020; Heintz et al. 2020).”
Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (2021, background): “Though there are small disparities between the host galaxies of the two classes, robust conclusions regarding their differences cannot yet be drawn owing to the small number of repeating sources with host galaxy associations (Bhandari et al. 2020; Heintz et al. 2020).”
Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, methodology): “In this section, we place the overall population of FRB hosts in context with the field galaxy population, expanding on our earlier work (Bhandari et al. 2020; Heintz et al. 2020).”