Fast Radio Burst Morphology in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog

By Z. Pleunis, D. Good, Victoria Kaspi, R. Mckinven, S. Ransom, P. Scholz, K. Bandura, M. Bhardwaj, P. Boyle, C. Brar and 21 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2021

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a synthesis of fast radio burst (FRB) morphology (the change in flux as a function of time and frequency) as detected in the 400–800 MHz octave by the FRB project on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME/FRB), using events from the first CHIME/FRB catalog. The catalog consists of 62 bursts from 18 repeating sources, plus 474 one-off FRBs, detected between 2018 July 25 and 2019 July 2. We identify four observed archetypes of burst morphology (“simple broadband,” “simple narrowband,” “temporally complex,” and “downward drifting”) and describe relevant instrumental biases that are essential for interpreting the observed morphologies. Using the catalog properties of the FRBs, we confirm that bursts from repeating sources, on average, have larger widths, and we show, for the first time, that bursts from repeating sources, on average, are narrower in bandwidth. This difference could be due to beaming or propagation effects, or it could be intrinsic to the populations. We discuss potential implications of these morphological differences for using FRBs as astrophysical tools.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6956fa1238d28e027931a937c0388c41dff349e8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, background): “…the sky locations and dispersion measures (DMs) of the two FRB populations are consistent with being drawn from the same distribution, the bursts from repeating sources have wider pulse widths and narrower bandwidths compared to apparent nonrepeaters (Fonseca et al. 2020; Pleunis et al. 2021).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “…merger products have been proposed as a source for some fast radio bursts (Totani, 2013; Ravi and Lasky, 2014); however, there are likely multiple progenitor channels for fast radio bursts (Pleunis et al., 2021), so these cannot presently be confidently used for merger rate estimates.”