Constraints on the distribution and energetics of fast radio bursts using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations

By Klaus Dolag, B. Gaensler, A. Beck, Marcus C. Beck. 2014

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present constraints on the origins of fast radio bursts (F RBs) using one of the largest currently available cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We use these simulations to calculate contributions to the dispersion measures (DMs) of FRBs from the Milky Way, from the local Universe out to � 100 Mpc, from cosmological large-scale structure and from potential FRB host galaxies, and we then compare the results of these simulations to the DMs for observed FRBs. We find that the foreground Milky Way contr ibution has previously been underestimated by a factor of � 2, and that the the distribution of foreground-subtracted DMs is consistent with a cosmological origin, corresponding to a population of sources observable out to a maximum redshift z � 0.6 0.9. We consider models for the spatial distribution and occurrence of FRBs in which they are randomly distributed in the Universe, track the star-formation rate of their host galaxies, track total ste llar mass, or require the presence of a central supermassive black hole. While the current data (nine extragalactic FRBs) do not allow us to distinguish between these possibilities, we show that the predicted distributions of DM for these different models will differ considerably once we begin detecting significant fractions of FRBs at higher DMs and higher redshifts. We additionally consider the distribution of fluences for observed FRBs, and show that the observations are consistent with the hypothesis that FRBs are standard candles, each burst producing the same radiated isotropic energy. Comparing the combined DM and fluence distributions with our cosmological model, we find that the data are consistent with a constant isotropic burst energy of � 4 × 10 40 erg if FRBs are embedded in host galaxies, or two times higher if FRBs are randomly distributed over the cosmic volume. These energies are a factor of 10‐100 times larger than had previously been inferred. Within the limited constraints of the available s mall sample of data, our analysis favours FRB mechanisms for which the isotropic burst energy has a narrow distribution in excess of 10 40 erg.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e70ed86a8a38bd81877d38ecc1bd1b09de1b162

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michael Kramer
2. Jim Cordes
3. Ingrid Stairs
4. A. Jameson
5. M. Bailes
6. E. Keane
7. E. Petroff
8. Victoria Kaspi

Citations in the corpus

• A living theory catalogue for fast radio bursts (2018, background): “These estimates suggest a cosmological origin (Dolag et al., 2015; Kulkarni et al., 2014; Katz, 2016d; Caleb et al., 2016; Vedantham et al., 2016a; Cao et al., 2017; Niino, 2018).”
• Supergiant pulses from extragalactic neutron stars (2015, methodology): “This may account for the apparent standard-candle nature of ERBs deduced by Dolag et al. (2014) from a statistical analysis of ERBs.”
• A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, methodology): “…of the Milky Way assuming that the ISM in the FRB sight line is dominated by diffuse WIM; see Section 3.1. f The DM contribution of the Milky Way using the NH–DM relation from He et al. (2013); see Section 3.1. g Milky Way halo prediction from the Dolag et al. (2015) hydrodynamic simulation.”
• Nine New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources from CHIME/FRB (2020, background): “FRBs are an enigmatic class of radio transients that exhibit millisecond durations, cosmological distances and large energy output (∼ 1040 erg; Dolag et al. 2015).”
• FRBCAT: The Fast Radio Burst Catalogue (2016, methodology): “The Galactic DM contribution is derived using the NE2001 Galactic electron density model (Cordes & Lazio 2002) and should be taken as an estimate as the free electron content of the Galactic halo is not well constrained (Dolag et al. 2015).”
• Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, methodology): “We further emphasize that these models imply significantly greater DM contributions (2 − 3×) from the Galaxy halo than those typically adopted in the FRB literature (Dolag et al. 2015), where a lower halo mass and steeper density profile were been assumed.”