The Host Galaxy and Redshift of the Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102
By S. Tendulkar, Cees G. Bassa, J. Cordes, G. C. Bower, C. Law, S. Chatterjee, E. Adams, S. Bogdanov, S. Burke-Spolaor, Bryan Butler and 14 more. 2017
426 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The precise localization of the repeating fast radio burst (FRB 121102) has provided the first unambiguous association (chance coincidence probability p ≲ 3 × 10−4) of an FRB with an optical and persistent radio counterpart. We report on optical imaging and spectroscopy of the counterpart and find that it is an extended (0.″6–0.″8) object displaying prominent Balmer and [O iii] emission lines. Based on the spectrum and emission line ratios, we classify the counterpart as a low-metallicity, star-forming, mr′ = 25.1 AB mag dwarf galaxy at a redshift of z = 0.19273(8), corresponding to a luminosity distance of 972 Mpc. From the angular size, the redshift, and luminosity, we estimate the host galaxy to have a diameter ≲4 kpc and a stellar mass of M* ∼ (4–7) × 107 M⊙, assuming a mass-to-light ratio between 2 to 3 M⊙ L⊙−1. Based on the Hα flux, we estimate the star formation rate of the host to be 0.4 M⊙ yr−1 and a substantial host dispersion measure (DM) depth ≲324 pc cm−3. The net DM contribution of the host galaxy to FRB 121102 is likely to be lower than this value depending on geometrical factors. We show that the persistent radio source at FRB 121102’s location reported by Marcote et al. is offset from the galaxy’s center of light by ∼200 mas and the host galaxy does not show optical signatures for AGN activity. If FRB 121102 is typical of the wider FRB population and if future interferometric localizations preferentially find them in dwarf galaxies with low metallicities and prominent emission lines, they would share such a preference with long gamma-ray bursts and superluminous supernovae.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5156c3763b3e68c59b337e0234ffba920f0eef18
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Citations in the corpus
- Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, positive): “Initial attempts to apply these ideas (Tingay and Kaplan 2016; Wu et al. 2016), turned out to be thwarted due to being based upon FRB 20150418A which was not convincingly established to be associated with a galaxy at z 1⁄4 0:492 (Keane et al. 2016). While subsequent constraints based on FRBs 2018092”
- A “Cosmic Comb” Model of Fast Radio Bursts (2017, background): “The source is associated with a radio source (Marcote et al. 2017), which is offset from the center of the galaxy (Tendulkar et al. 2017).”
- 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, background): “Tendulkar et al. (2017) identified their host galaxy with redshift z ≈ 0.19.”
- An X-ray burst from a magnetar enlightening the mechanism of fast radio bursts (2020, methodology): “d for five FRBs. Table 1 summarizes the assumptions and the resulting redshifts obtained here. Table 2 shows the assumptions and the measured redshifts of the five FRBs as presented in the literature [30,47, 48,49,50]. Our method based on the assumption DM (HALO) + DM (HOST) = 100 pc cm-3 provides v”
- The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales (2017, methodology): “This value would be hard to reconcile with the fact that the stellar mass of the host galaxy is likely at least an order of magnitude less than that, and its optical spectrum shows no signatures of AGN activity (Tendulkar et al. 2017).”
- Lensing of Fast Radio Bursts by Plasma Structures in Host Galaxies (2017, background): “However it is only with the measurement of the redshift of the host galaxy firmly associated with the repeating FRB121102 (Chatterjee et al. 2017; Marcote et al. 2017; Tendulkar et al. 2017) that the extragalactic nature of an FRB has been confirmed without qualification.”
- A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “One possibility is that the progenitors of FRB 180916 (or FRB 121102, Spitler et al. 2016) may be produced from extreme explosions such as long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs), superluminous supernovae (SLSNe, e.g., Metzger et al. 2017), or mergers of neutron stars (e.g., Margalit et al. 2019; Wang et al. ”
- A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, background): “An FRB 121102-like star-forming dwarf galaxy (Mr=−17 AB mag; Tendulkar et al. 2017), if located at zmax, would have an rband magnitude of ≈19 AB mag.”