A fast radio burst associated with a Galactic magnetar

By C. Bochenek, V. Ravi, K. Belov, G. Hallinan, J. Kocz, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, D. McKenna. Nature, 2020

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since their discovery in 20071, much effort has been devoted to uncovering the sources of the extragalactic, millisecond-duration fast radio bursts (FRBs)2. A class of neutron stars known as magnetars is a leading candidate source of FRBs3,4. Magnetars have surface magnetic fields in excess of 1014 gauss, the decay of which powers a range of high-energy phenomena5. Here we report observations of a millisecond-duration radio burst from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154, with a fluence of 1.5 ± 0.3 megajansky milliseconds. This event, FRB 200428 (ST 200428A), was detected on 28 April 2020 by the STARE2 radio array6 in the 1,281–1,468 megahertz band. The isotropic-equivalent energy released in FRB 200428 is 4 × 103 times greater than that of any radio pulse from the Crab pulsar—previously the source of the brightest Galactic radio bursts observed on similar timescales7. FRB 200428 is just 30 times less energetic than the weakest extragalactic FRB observed so far8, and is drawn from the same population as the observed FRB sample. The coincidence of FRB 200428 with an X-ray burst9–11 favours emission models that describe synchrotron masers or electromagnetic pulses powered by magnetar bursts and giant flares3,4,12,13. The discovery of FRB 200428 implies that active magnetars such as SGR 1935+2154 can produce FRBs at extragalactic distances. Observations of the fast radio burst FRB 200428 coinciding with X-rays from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 indicate that active magnetars can produce fast radio bursts at extragalactic distances.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09a83e49fe785f072a58c00570869d45723aca53

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. Pawan Kumar
3. R. Shannon
4. B. Metzger
5. Wenbin Lu
6. S. Burke-Spolaor
7. K. Bannister
8. S. Tendulkar

Citations in the corpus

• Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, background): “In addition, SGR 1935 +2154 is located approximately 9 kpc from the Galactic center (Kothes et al. 2018; Bochenek et al. 2020b), which is in the high end of the physical offset distribution of the burst sites observed here.”
• Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, methodology): “We used the method described in Bochenek et al. (2020) to correct for redshift evolution by scaling the stellar masses and SFRs of host galaxies of FRBs and other transients to be statistically representative of z= 0 galaxies.”
• Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (2021, background): “The recent discovery of a ∼MJy radio burst from Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 (CHIME/FRB Collaboration et al. 2020b; Bochenek et al. 2020) has shown that magnetars are viable candidates as the sources of at least some fraction of FRBs.”
• A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, background): “The recent discovery of FRB-like radio bursts (Bochenek et al. 2020; CHIME/FRB Collaboration et al. 2020) and coincident X-ray bursts (Li et al. 2021; Mereghetti et al. 2020; Ridnaia et al. 2021) from Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 strongly argues that at least some FRB sources are magnetars.”
• A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, methodology): “…for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2, 1.3-1.5 GHz) independently detected a fast radio burst (hereafter FRB 200428), which is spatially coincident with the well known galactic Soft Gamma-ray Repeater (SGR) 1935+2154 (Scholtz & The CHIME Collaboration 2020; Bochenek et al. 2020b).”