THE GALACTIC POSITION DEPENDENCE OF FAST RADIO BURSTS AND THE DISCOVERY OF FRB011025

By S. Burke-Spolaor, K. Bannister. 2014

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We report the detection of a dispersed fast radio burst (FRB) in archival intermediate-latitude Parkes Radio Telescope data. The burst appears to be of the same physical origin as the four purported extragalactic FRBs reported by Thornton et al. This burst's arrival time precedes the Thornton et al. bursts by 10 years. We consider that this survey, and many other archival low-latitude (|gb| < 30°) pulsar surveys, have been searched for FRBs but produced fewer detections than the comparatively brief Thornton et al. search. Such a rate dependence on Galactic position could provide critical supporting evidence for an extragalactic origin for FRBs. To test this, we form an analytic expression to account for Galactic position and survey setup in FRB rate predictions. Employing a sky temperature, scattering, and dispersion model of the Milky Way, we compute the expected number of FRBs if they are isotropically distributed on the sky with respect to the Galactic position (i.e., local), and if they are of extragalactic origin. We demonstrate that the relative detection rates reject a local origin with a confidence of 99.96% (∼3.6σ). The extragalactic predictions provide a better agreement; however, there are still strong discrepancies with the low-latitude detection rate at a confidence of 99.69% (∼2.9σ). However, for the extragalactic population, the differences in predicted versus detected population may be accounted for by a number of factors, which we discuss.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c013ab43f20a0cab1a6dd7a49d512f5941d79d6

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. Michael Kramer
3. B. Metzger
4. Jim Cordes
5. R. Shannon
6. V. Ravi
7. Simon Johnston
8. S. Burke-Spolaor

Citations in the corpus

• 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): “Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a new class of transients discovered in the last decade (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Spitler et al. 2014; Ravi, Shannon & Jameson 2015; Petroff et al. 2015; Masui et al. 2015; Champion et al. 2015).”
• FRBCAT: The Fast Radio Burst Catalogue (2016, background): “To date, the majority of FRB discoveries have been made at the Parkes radio telescope (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Petroff et al. 2015; Ravi, Shannon, & Jameson 2015; Champion et al. 2016; Keane et al. 2016; Spitler et al. 2016),…”
• THE REPEATING FAST RADIO BURST FRB 121102: MULTI-WAVELENGTH OBSERVATIONS AND ADDITIONAL BURSTS (2016, background): “In addition, two Parkes FRBs have ∆tDM = 7 ms, comparable to their observed widths (Keane et al. 2011; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014).”
• The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts – II. New FRB discoveries and their follow-up. (2017, background): “…the upgraded Molonglo synthesis telescope (UTMOST) and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Spitler et al. 2014; Masui et al. 2015; Petroff et al. 2015a, 2017; Ravi, Shannon & Jameson 2015; Champion et al.…”
• A FAST RADIO BURST IN THE DIRECTION OF THE CARINA DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXY (2014, methodology): “Seven FRBs have recently been found in surveys at ∼ 1.4GHz with both the Parkes (Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014) and Arecibo (Spitler et al. 2014) telescopes.”
• Constraints on the distribution and energetics of fast radio bursts using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations (2014, background): “…observational perspective, the fluxes and fluences of FRBs are difficult to determine (e.g., Spitleret al. 2014), and the selection effects associated with the detectability of FRBs are still being understood (Lorimer et al. 2013; Petroff et al. 2014b; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Keane 2014).”
• A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up (2014, methodology): “Using the rate derived in Burke-Spolaor & Bannister (2014) we estimate a much lower detection probability of ∼ 2% from our survey.”
• FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM THE INSPIRAL OF DOUBLE NEUTRON STARS (2016, background): “Up to now, 17 FRBs have been detected (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Spitler et al. 2014, 2016; Ravi et al. 2015; Petroff et al. 2015; Champion et al. 2015; Masui et al. 2015; Keane et al. 2016).”
• Supergiant pulses from extragalactic neutron stars (2015, background): “…recently discovered events with DMs too large to be accounted for by the Galaxy have been termed ‘fast radio bursts’ (FRBs) (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2011; Thornton et al. 2013; Spitler et al. 2014; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Ravi et al. 2014) and appear to be extragalactic in origin.”
• Fast radio bursts: search sensitivities and completeness (2014, unknown): “Some additional selection effects have been identified empirically, e.g. FRBs seem to be much more difficult to detect at lower Galactic latitudes, despite intensive efforts (Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Petroff et al. 2014a).”
• Five new fast radio bursts from the HTRU high-latitude survey at Parkes: First evidence for two-component bursts (2015, background): “Since then, FRB 010125 has been found in archival data that predates the first discovery (Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014), FRB 140514 was detected in real time allowing for fast multi-frequency follow up (Petroff et al. 2015a) and FRB 131104 was discovered during observations of the Carina Dwarf…”