Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts

By J. Xavier Prochaska, Yong Zheng UC Santa Cruz, Uc Berkeley. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The precise localization ( 0.1 galaxies has confirmed that the dispersion measures (DMs) of these enigmatic sources afford a new opportunity to probe the diffuse ionized gas around and in between galaxies. In this manuscript, we examine the signatures of gas in dark matter halos (aka halo gas) on DM observations in current and forthcoming FRB surveys. Combining constraints from observations of the high velocity clouds, OVII absorption, and the DM to the Large Magellanic Cloud with hydrostatic models of halo gas, we estimate that our Galactic halo will contribute ${\rm DM}_{\rm MW,halo} \approx 50-80 \rm pc/cm^{-3}$ from the Sun to 200 kpc independent of any contribution from the Galactic ISM. Extending analysis to the Local Group, we demonstrate that M31's halo will be easily detected by high-sample FRB surveys (e.g. CHIME) although signatures from a putative Local Group medium may compete. We then review current empirical constraints on halo gas in distant galaxies and discuss the implications for their DM contributions. We further examine the DM probability distribution function of a population of FRBs at z >> 0 using an updated halo mass function and new models for the halo density profile. Lastly, we illustrate the potential of FRB experiments for resolving the baryonic fraction of halos by analyzing simulated sightlines through the CASBaH survey. All of the code and data products of our analysis are available at this https URL.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a906886fc64b514ac273d561976cc8e95a398d88

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Citations in the corpus

Nine New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources from CHIME/FRB (2020, methodology): “Neither model accounts for DM contributions from the Galactic halo, which is thought to be 50–80 pc cm−3 (Prochaska & Zheng 2019). f For sources observed twice a day, the second entry corresponds to the less sensitive lower transit.”
A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, methodology): “To check if our most constraining M81 DMhalo estimate is conservative, we estimated the Milky Way DMhalo using the MB04 profile, fb,halo= 0.4, and other Milky Way halo parameters from Prochaska & Zheng (2019) and found DMhalo≈ 13 pc cm −3 .”
Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, background): “Assuming a Galactic halo contribution of = -DM 50 pc cmMW,halo 3 17 The Astrophysical Journal, 903:152 (22pp), 2020 November 10 Heintz et al. (Prochaska & Zheng 2019; Platts et al. 2020, but see Keating & Pen 2020) and a host contribution of -80 pc cm 3 in the host rest-frame, we have an estimated c”
CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources (2019, methodology): “If we assume a halo DM contribution of 50–80 pc cm−3 (Prochaska & Zheng 2019), the YMW16 model places Source 1 within the Milky Way halo.”
An X-ray burst from a magnetar enlightening the mechanism of fast radio bursts (2020, methodology): “alo (MilkyWay halo, DM (HALO) ), inter-galactic, DM (IG) and host galaxy, DM (HOST) . DM (GAL) value was obtained by the catalogues. From literature we find DM (HALO) to be in the range 50-80 pc cm-3 [44]. As in our 1 available at the web page https://www.frbcat.org 2 available at the web page https”