A Flaring Magnetar in FRB 121102?
By A. Beloborodov. 2017
279 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The persistent radio counterpart of fast radio burst (FRB) 121102 is estimated to have particles, energy erg, and size cm. The source can be nebula inflated and heated by an intermittent outflow from a magnetar—a neutron star powered by its magnetic (rather than rotational) energy. The object is young and frequently liberating energy in magnetic flares driven by accelerated ambipolar diffusion in the neutron star core, feeding the nebula and producing bright millisecond bursts. The particle number in the nebula is consistent with ion ejecta from giant flares. The nebula may also contain the freeze-out of electron–positron pairs created months after the neutron star birth; the same mechanism offers an explanation for in the Crab Nebula. The persistent source around FRB 121102 is likely heated by magnetic dissipation and internal waves excited by the magnetar ejecta. The volumetric heating by waves explains the nebula’s enormous efficiency in producing radio emission. The repeating radio bursts are suggested to occur much closer to the magnetar, as a result of ultrarelativistic internal shocks in the magnetar wind, which are launched by the magnetospheric flares. The shocks are mediated by Larmor rotation, which forms a GHz maser with the observed ms duration. Furthermore, the flare ejecta can become charge-starved and then convert to electromagnetic waves.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9df781de5b7139ad73af1ba787dd93ecee96242
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “…ejecta from a neutron star (or black hole) dissipates its energy at large dis- tances by interacting with the circum-stellar medium (CSM) and the radio emission is generated by a maser process (Lyubarsky 2014; Waxman 2017; Beloborodov 2017, 2019; Metzger et al. 2019; Margalit et al. 2020).”
- Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, methodology): “One significant difference from previous work (Beloborodov 2017) is our assumption that the external medium is a sub-relativistic electronion outflow, instead of an ultra-relativistic wind.”
- A Concordance Picture of FRB 121102 as a Flaring Magnetar Embedded in a Magnetized Ion–Electron Wind Nebula (2018, background): “We model Ė as a smooth function of time, but in reality the energy release could occur intermittently, e.g., associated with the same discrete flaring events responsible for powering the repeating FRB (Beloborodov 2017).”
- A Multi-telescope Campaign on FRB 121102: Implications for the FRB Population (2017, background): “This is consistent with the idea that magnetar bursts can generate both the millisecond-duration bursts and persistent radio emission from FRB 121102 (Beloborodov 2017).”
- A living theory catalogue for fast radio bursts (2018, methodology): “This presents a conflict (Zhang, 2018): the enormous brightness temperatures of FRB emission requires strong magnetic fields close to the magnetar surface (Kumar et al., 2017; Beloborodov, 2017).”