Fast Radio Bursts from Magnetars Born in Binary Neutron Star Mergers and Accretion Induced Collapse

By B. Margalit, E. Berger, B. Metzger. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently born magnetars are promising candidates for the engines powering fast radio bursts (FRBs). The focus thus far has been placed on millisecond magnetars born in rare core-collapse explosions, motivated by the star-forming dwarf host galaxy of the repeating FRB 121102, which is remarkably similar to the hosts of superluminous supernovae and long gamma-ray bursts. However, long-lived magnetars may also be created in binary neutron star (BNS) mergers, in the small subset of cases with a sufficiently low total mass for the remnant to avoid collapse to a black hole, or in the accretion-induced collapse (AIC) of a white dwarf. A BNS or AIC FRB channel will be characterized by distinct host galaxy and spatial offset distributions which we show are consistent with the recently reported FRB 180924, localized by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to a massive quiescent host galaxy with an offset of about 1.4 effective radii. Using models calibrated to FRB 121102, we make predictions for the dispersion measure, rotation measure, and persistent radio emission from magnetar FRB sources born in BNS mergers or AIC, and show these are consistent with upper limits from FRB 180924. Depending on the rate of AIC, and the fraction of BNS mergers leaving long-lived stable magnetars, the birth rate of repeating FRB sources associated with older stellar populations could be comparable to that of the core-collapse channel. We also discuss potential differences in the repetition properties of these channels, as a result of differences in the characteristic masses and magnetic fields of the magnetars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61c74fd6c0b2b9fbc9e3963366bf86c6eaee6455

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1. Bing Zhang
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Citations in the corpus

• A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “…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. 2020), so that they have relatively short (e.g. millisecond) periods at births (Usov 1992; Zhang & Mészáros 2001;…”
• Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, background): “We also included Type Ia supernovae—a proxy for the AIC of WD stars, which have been suggested as possible FRB progenitors (Margalit et al. 2019; Kirsten et al. 2021).”
• Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, unknown): “This has led to the hypothesis that FRBs may be magnetars formed via a variety of channels including core collapse supernovae, binary mergers and accretion-induced collapse (Margalit et al. 2019; Gourdji et al. 2020).”