Supergiant pulses from extragalactic neutron stars

By Jim Cordes, I. Wasserman. 2015

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider radio bursts that originate from extragalactic neutron stars (NSs) by addressing three questions about source distances. What are the physical limitations on coherent radiation at GHz frequencies? Do they permit detection at cosmological distances? How many bursts per NS are needed to produce the inferred burst rate 10 3 -10 4 sky 1 day 1 ? The burst rate is comparable to the NS formation rate in a Hubble volume, requiring only one per NS if they are bright enough. However, radiation physics causes us to favor a closer population. More bursts per NS are then required but repeats in 10 to 100 yr could still be negligible. Bursts are modeled as sub-ns, coherent shot pulses superposed incoherently to produce msduration 1 Jy amplitudes; each shot-pulse can be much weaker than the burst amplitude, placing less restrictive requirements on the emission process. Nonetheless, single shot pulses are similar to the extreme, unresolved (< 0:4 ns) MJy shot pulse seen from the Crab pulsar, which is consistent with coherent curvature radiation emitted near the light cylinder by an almost neutral clump with net charge 10 21 e and total energy & 10 23 ergs. Bursts from Gpc distances require incoherent superposition of 10 12 d 2 shot pulses or a total energy & 10 35 d 2 erg. The energy reservoir near the light cylinder limits the detection distance to . few 100 Mpc for a fluence 1 Jy ms unless conditions are more extreme than for the Crab pulsar. Similarly, extreme single pulses from ordinary pulsars and magnetars could be detectable from throughout the Local Group and perhaps farther. Contributions to dispersion measures from galaxy clusters will be significant for some of the bursts. We discuss tests for the signatures of bursts associated with extragalactic NSs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e71ea1f06b9bda89e1089843904bdeb25da7343

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
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4. Pawan Kumar
5. E. Berger
6. Xuefeng Wu
7. Michael Kramer
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Citations in the corpus

• The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts – II. New FRB discoveries and their follow-up. (2017, background): “…leading theories suggesting giant flares from magnetars (Thornton et al. 2013; Pen & Connor 2015), compact objects located in young expanding supernovae (Connor, Sievers & Pen 2016; Piro 2016) and supergiant pulses from extragalactic neutron stars (Cordes & Wasserman 2016) as possible progenitors.”
• Lensing of Fast Radio Bursts by Plasma Structures in Host Galaxies (2017, background): “…long filaments are seen in the Crab Nebula and it is possible that FRB121102 is associated with a young neutron star in a supernova remnant (e.g. Pen & Connor 2015; Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Connor et al. 2016; Metzger et al. 2017; Chatterjee et al. 2017; Marcote et al. 2017; Tendulkar et al. 2017).”
• THE REPEATING FAST RADIO BURST FRB 121102: MULTI-WAVELENGTH OBSERVATIONS AND ADDITIONAL BURSTS (2016, background): “Rather, they must be due to a repeating phenomenon such as giant pulses from neutron stars (Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Pen & Connor 2015) or bursts from magnetars (Popov & Postnov 2013).”
• Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (2021, background): “Repeater bursts might be made up of multiple subbursts analogous to the main pulse of the Crab pulsar (see, e.g., Cordes & Wasserman 2016), with many of the subburst separations below the time resolution of the CHIME/FRB ∼1 ms data and most other detection systems.”
• MERGERS OF CHARGED BLACK HOLES: GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE EVENTS, SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURSTS, AND FAST RADIO BURSTS (2016, background): “Spitler et al. (2016), on the other hand, reported repeating bursts from FRB 121102, which point towards an origin of a young pulsar, probably in nearby galaxies (e.g. Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Connor et al. 2016).”
• FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM THE INSPIRAL OF DOUBLE NEUTRON STARS (2016, background): “…et al. 2013), blitzars (Falcke & Rezzolla 2014; Zhang 2014), eruptions of nearby flaring stars (Loeb et al. 2014), collisions between NSs and asteroids/comets (Geng & Huang 2015), giant pulses from pulsars (Connor et al. 2016; Cordes & Wasserman 2016), and charged BH-BH merg- ers (Zhang 2016a).”
• A “Cosmic Comb” Model of Fast Radio Bursts (2017, unknown): “The previously favored supergiant-pulse model (in analogy to nanoshots from the Crab pulsar) (Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Connor et al. 2016) invokes nearby galaxy not at the cosmological distances and therefore are challenged by the fact that the repeater is located in a host galaxy at redshift z =…”
• The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales (2017, methodology): “The repetition and energetics of the bursts from FRB 121102 have been used to argue that it comes from a young neutron star or magnetar (Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Lyutikov et al. 2016; Popov & Pshirkov 2016).”
• Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model (2017, background): “The basic reason for requiring an extremely small fractional charge is that the energy of FRB electromagnetic waves comes from particles’ initial kinetic energy in the model of Cordes & Wasserman (2016).”
• A Multi-telescope Campaign on FRB 121102: Implications for the FRB Population (2017, background): “Radio bursts from FRB 121102 require either dramatic scaling of known emission processes (Lyutikov et al. 2016; Cordes & Wasserman 2016) and/or strong amplification by propagation effects (Cordes et al. 2017).”
• A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “The second class are the “close-in” models which describe that the coherent processes occur within the magnetosphere of a neutron star (Pen & Connor 2015; Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Lyutikov et al. 2016; Kumar et al. 2017; Zhang 2017; Lu & Kumar 2018; Yang & Zhang 2018; Kumar & Bošnjak 2020).”
• A burst in a wind bubble and the impact on baryonic ejecta: high-energy gamma-ray flashes and afterglows from fast radio bursts and pulsar-driven supernova remnants (2016, methodology): “The RNS scenario may include the blitzar model and other models motivated by giant pulses from the Crab pulsar (Falcke & Rezzolla 2014; Cordes & Wasserman 2016).”
• Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, background): “…down to tens of microseconds (Michilli et al. 2018), are suggestive of their central engines being stellar-mass compact objects such as pulsars (Cordes & Wasserman 2016) or magnetars (e.g. Popov & Postnov 2013; Lyubarsky 2014; Kulkarni et al. 2015), especially ones at particularly active…”
• Millisecond Magnetar Birth Connects FRB 121102 to Superluminous Supernovae and Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2017, background): “…al. (2017) and Tendulkar et al. (2017) to argue a possible origin associated with a young neutron star or magnetar (Kulkarni et al. 2015; Katz 2016; Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Lyutikov et al. 2016; Popov & Pshirkov 2016; Yang et al. 2016), embedded within the ejecta shell of a young supernova (SN)…”