THE REPEATING FAST RADIO BURST FRB 121102: MULTI-WAVELENGTH OBSERVATIONS AND ADDITIONAL BURSTS

By P. Scholz, L. Spitler, Jason W. T. Hessels, S. Chatterjee, J. Cordes, Victoria Kaspi, R. Wharton, Cees G. Bassa, S. Bogdanov, F. Camilo and 14 more. 2016

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on radio and X-ray observations of the only known repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) source, FRB 121102. We have detected six additional radio bursts from this source: five with the Green Bank Telescope at 2 GHz, and one at 1.4 GHz with the Arecibo Observatory, for a total of 17 bursts from this source. All have dispersion measures consistent with a single value (∼559 pc cm−3) that is three times the predicted maximum Galactic contribution. The 2 GHz bursts have highly variable spectra like those at 1.4 GHz, indicating that the frequency structure seen across the individual 1.4 and 2 GHz bandpasses is part of a wideband process. X-ray observations of the FRB 121102 field with the Swift and Chandra observatories show at least one possible counterpart; however, the probability of chance superposition is high. A radio imaging observation of the field with the Jansky Very Large Array at 1.6 GHz yields a 5σ upper limit of 0.3 mJy on any point-source continuum emission. This upper limit, combined with archival Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer 22 μm and IPHAS Hα surveys, rules out the presence of an intervening Galactic H ii region. We update our estimate of the FRB detection rate in the PALFA survey to be FRBs sky−1 day−1 (95% confidence) for peak flux density at 1.4 GHz above 300 mJy. We find that the intrinsic widths of the 12 FRB 121102 bursts from Arecibo are, on average, significantly longer than the intrinsic widths of the 13 single-component FRBs detected with the Parkes telescope.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be1a4b18877eac4909935163705670f8129398ea

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. B. Margalit
4. Pawan Kumar
5. E. Berger
6. Xuefeng Wu
7. Wenbin Lu
8. L. Sironi

Citations in the corpus

• A “Cosmic Comb” Model of Fast Radio Bursts (2017, background): “Whereas the source of FRB 121102 clearly repeats (Spitler et al. 2016; Scholz et al. 2016), other FRBs so far have not been observed to repeat, despite dedicated follow-up observations for some of them (Petroff et al. 2015b); 2.”
• The Detection of an Extremely Bright Fast Radio Burst in a Phased Array Feed Survey (2017, background): “Similar dropouts are seen in other FRBs, notably the repeating FRB (FRB121102; Scholz et al. 2016), and it is similarly unclear whether these are intrinsic to the bursts or the result of scintillation.”
• FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM THE INSPIRAL OF DOUBLE NEUTRON STARS (2016, background): “…observations of FRB 110523 associated with a dense magnetized plasma (Masui et al. 2015) and the repeating FRB 121102 (Spitler et al. 2014, 2016; Scholz et al. 2016) seem to disfavor catastrophic event models including old NSs, as indicated by classification of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), at least…”
• Fast radio burst source properties and curvature radiation model (2017, methodology): “…DM from the supernova remnant is nearly constant for a period of a few years as required by the data for FRB 121102 from which 17 bursts have been detected (Spitler et al. 2016; Scholz et al. 2016); this point has already been made recently by (Murase et al. 2016; Piro 2016; Metzger et al. 2017).”
• A Multi-telescope Campaign on FRB 121102: Implications for the FRB Population (2017, methodology): “Figure 7 shows the FRB 121102 burst energy cumulative distribution as seen by the VLA and calculated from prior observations by Arecibo and the Green Bank Telescope (Spitler et al. 2016; Scholz et al. 2016).”
• Lensing of Fast Radio Bursts by Plasma Structures in Host Galaxies (2017, background): “Single burst spectra show rises toward lower frequencies in some cases and rises toward higher frequencies or midband maxima in other; burst shapes also show evolution with frequency across the band (Spitler et al. 2014, 2016; Scholz et al. 2016).”
• Millisecond Magnetar Birth Connects FRB 121102 to Superluminous Supernovae and Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2017, background): “Although most FRBs are detected as single bursts, several were discovered to repeat with consistent DM and sky localization (Spitler et al. 2014, 2016; Scholz et al. 2016).”
• The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales (2017, methodology): “The PUPPI data were coherently dedispersed to a DM = 557 pc cm−3, as previously done by Scholz et al. (2016).”