Fast Radio Bursts: An Extragalactic Enigma
By Jim Cordes, S. Chatterjee. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2019
389 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We summarize our understanding of millisecond radio bursts from an extragalactic population of sources. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) occur at an extraordinary rate, thousands per day over the entire sky with radiation energy densities at the source about ten billion times larger than those from Galactic pulsars. We survey FRB phenomenology, source models and host galaxies, coherent radiation models, and the role of plasma propagation effects in burst detection. The FRB field is guaranteed to be exciting: New telescopes will expand the sample from the current ∼80 unique burst sources (and only a few secure localizations and redshifts) to thousands, with burst localizations that enable host-galaxy redshifts emerging directly from interferometric surveys. ▪ FRBs are now established as an extragalactic phenomenon. ▪ Only a few sources are known to repeat. Despite the failure to redetect other FRBs, they are not inconsistent with all being repeaters. ▪ FRB sources may be new, exotic kinds of objects or known types in extreme circumstances. Many inventive models exist, ranging from alien spacecraft to cosmic strings, but those concerning compact objects and supermassive black holes have gained the most attention. A rapidly rotating magnetar is a promising explanation for FRB 121102 along with the persistent source associated with it, but alternative source models are not ruled out for it or other FRBs. ▪ FRBs are powerful tracers of circumsource environments, “missing baryons” in the intergalactic medium (IGM), and dark matter. ▪ The relative contributions of host galaxies and the IGM to propagation effects have yet to be disentangled, so dispersion measure distances have large uncertainties.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c4f51a88303a5bd34da2c893b4fc22727164816
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Citations in the corpus
- Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (2021, background): “Fast radio bursts (FRBs; Lorimer et al. 2007) are microsecond–millisecond dispersed impulses of radio waves that are observed out to cosmological distances (see Cordes & Chatterjee 2019; Petroff et al. 2019, for reviews of the phenomenon).”
- INTEGRAL Discovery of a Burst with Associated Radio Emission from the Magnetar SGR 1935+2154 (2020, background): “Fast radio bursts (FRBs; see Cordes & Chatterjee 2019; Petroff et al. 2019 for reviews) are an enigmatic class of sources emitting short (∼1–10 ms) pulses of radio emission with peak fluxes of ∼0.1–100 Jy at 1.4 GHz and dispersion measures (DMs) in excess of the Milky Way values along their lines…”
- A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “Many ideas have been proposed (see Katz 2016a; Petroff et al. 2019; Cordes & Chatterjee 2019, for recent reviews).”
- Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, neutral): “Further insights, and a much more detailed examination of propagation effects, can be found in Cordes and Chatterjee (2019).”
- Fast Radio Bursts from Magnetars Born in Binary Neutron Star Mergers and Accretion Induced Collapse (2019, background): “…an extragalactic origin (e.g., Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Spitler et al. 2014; Ravi et al. 2015; Champion et al. 2016; Petroff et al. 2016; Lawrence et al. 2017; Shannon et al. 2018; see Cordes & Chatterjee 2019; Petroff et al. 2019 for recent reviews).”
- Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, background): “The transients classified as fast radio bursts (FRBs) and their progenitors constitute one of the major puzzles in contemporary astrophysics (see Cordes & Chatterjee 2019; Petroff et al. 2019, for recent reviews).”