A “Cosmic Comb” Model of Fast Radio Bursts

By Bing Zhang. 2017

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations of fast radio bursts (FRBs) indicate a perplexing, inconsistent picture. We propose a unified scenario to interpret diverse FRBs observed. A regular pulsar, otherwise unnoticeable at a cosmological distance, may produce a bright FRB if its magnetosphere is suddenly “combed” by a nearby, strong plasma stream toward the anti-stream direction. If the Earth is to the night side of the stream, the combed magnetic sheath would sweep across the direction of Earth and make a detectable FRB. The stream could be an AGN flare, a GRB or supernova blastwave, a tidal disruption event, or even a stellar flare. Since it is the energy flux received by the pulsar rather than the luminosity of the stream origin that defines the properties of the FRB, this model predicts a variety of counterparts of FRBs, including a possible connection between FRB 150418 and an AGN flare, a possible connection between FRB 131104 and a weak GRB, a steady radio nebula associated with the repeating FRB 121102, and probably no bright counterparts for some FRBs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb8cb42b8472599726bad7bb294fbb23c701e0a1

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. B. Margalit
4. Pawan Kumar
5. L. Sironi
6. Wenbin Lu
7. Jason W. T. Hessels
8. E. Berger

Citations in the corpus

• Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, background): “This interaction was first pioneered in the context of AGN jets (e.g. Blandford & McKee 1976) and the synchrotron afterglow of gamma-ray burst (GRB) jets (e.g. Meszaros & Rees 1993; Sari & Piran 1995; Sari et al. 1998).”
• Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model (2017, background): “…clouds (Romero et al. 2016), asteroids colliding with neutron stars (Geng & Huang 2015; Dai et al. 2016), close neutron star-white dwarf binaries (Gu et al. 2016), lightning in the neutron star magnetosphere (Katz 2017), and plasma stream sweeping across the neutron star magnetosphere (Zhang 2017).”
• Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, unknown): “In the case of a binary model, it could be that interaction between two orbiting bodies is a prerequisite for producing bursts (Zhang 2017), though it has also been proposed that the modulation in activity level is due to absorption by intra-binary plasma (Lyutikov et al. 2020).”
• A living theory catalogue for fast radio bursts (2018, background): “The presence an expected multi-wavelength afterglow was not observed (Shannon and Ravi, 2017), but arguably may not be observable (Gao and Zhang, 2017).”
• A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “The second class are the “close-in” models which describe that the coherent processes occur within the magnetosphere of a neutron star (Pen & Connor 2015; Cordes & Wasserman 2016; Lyutikov et al. 2016; Kumar et al. 2017; Zhang 2017; Lu & Kumar 2018; Yang & Zhang 2018; Kumar & Bošnjak 2020).”
• A Multi-telescope Campaign on FRB 121102: Implications for the FRB Population (2017, background): “Many new models for the origin of FRBs have been developed in response to the localization of FRB 121102 (Kashiyama & Murase 2017; Metzger et al. 2017; Zhang 2017; Dokuchaev & Eroshenko 2017; Beloborodov 2017; Thompson 2017).”