A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances

By D. Thornton, B. W. Stappers, M. Bailes, B. Barsdell, S. Bates, N. Bhat, M. Burgay, S. Burke-Spolaor, David J. Champion, P. Coster and 10 more. Science, 2013

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Mysterious Radio Bursts It has been uncertain whether single, short, and bright bursts of radio emission that have been observed are celestial or terrestrial in origin. Thornton et al. (p. 53; see the Perspective by Cordes) report the detection of four nonrepeating radio transient events with millisecond duration in data from the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The properties of these radio bursts indicate that they had their origin outside our galaxy, but it is not possible to tell what caused them. Because the intergalactic medium affects the characteristics of the bursts, it will be possible to use them to study its properties. Radio telescope data revealed four short, extragalactic, nonrepeating bursts of radio emission whose source is unknown. [Also see Perspective by Cordes] Searches for transient astrophysical sources often reveal unexpected classes of objects that are useful physical laboratories. In a recent survey for pulsars and fast transients, we have uncovered four millisecond-duration radio transients all more than 40° from the Galactic plane. The bursts’ properties indicate that they are of celestial rather than terrestrial origin. Host galaxy and intergalactic medium models suggest that they have cosmological redshifts of 0.5 to 1 and distances of up to 3 gigaparsecs. No temporally coincident x- or gamma-ray signature was identified in association with the bursts. Characterization of the source population and identification of host galaxies offers an opportunity to determine the baryonic content of the universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

A Concordance Picture of FRB 121102 as a Flaring Magnetar Embedded in a Magnetized Ion–Electron Wind Nebula (2018, background): “Fast radio burts (FRB) are short pulses of coherent radio emission lasting less than a few milliseconds (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Spitler et al. 2014; Ravi et al. 2015; Champion et al. 2016; Petroff et al. 2016; Lawrence et al. 2017) with large dispersion…”
A burst in a wind bubble and the impact on baryonic ejecta: high-energy gamma-ray flashes and afterglows from fast radio bursts and pulsar-driven supernova remnants (2016, background): “Interestingly, despite being relatively common (∼ 10 % of core-collapse supernovae; Thornton et al. 2013; Keane & Petroff 2015; Law et al. 2015), the origin of FRBs is still unknown.”
A FAST RADIO BURST IN THE DIRECTION OF THE CARINA DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXY (2014, methodology): “Seven FRBs have recently been found in surveys at ∼ 1.4GHz with both the Parkes (Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014) and Arecibo (Spitler et al. 2014) telescopes.”
The Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102 as Seen on Milliarcsecond Angular Scales (2017, background): “Thus far, 18 FRBs have been discovered using single dish observations (e.g., Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013; Petroff et al. 2016).”
LOCATING THE “MISSING” BARYONS WITH EXTRAGALACTIC DISPERSION MEASURE ESTIMATES (2013, background): “Thornton et al. (2013) identified a class of out-of-the-plane, highly dispersed (and hence likely extragalactic) millisecond radio bursts, confirming previous indications (Lorimer et al. 2007).”
THE GALACTIC POSITION DEPENDENCE OF FAST RADIO BURSTS AND THE DISCOVERY OF FRB011025 (2014, methodology): “Based on the similarity of their basic observed properties (excess dispersion, duration, fluence [timeintegrated flux]), the burst appears to be of the same population as those reported by Thornton et al. (2013).”
THE MILLISECOND MAGNETAR CENTRAL ENGINE IN SHORT GRBs (2015, background): “Another interesting possibility is that a fast radio burst (e.g. Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013) may be released when the supra-massive magnetar collapses into a black hole (Zhang 2014; Falcke & Rezzolla 2014).”
Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, background): “FRBs are brief (∼1 ms), but bright (>1 Jy ms) radio-pulse events, similar in nature to pulsars, although their extragalactic origin (Thornton et al. 2013) implies much higher energies.”
Fifty years of pulsar candidate selection: from simple filters to a new principled real-time classification approach (2016, background): “Real-time searches for fast radio bursts (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013) are also becoming increasingly common (Karastergiou et al. 2015; Law et al. 2015; Petroff et al. 2015).”
A model for fast extragalactic radio bursts (2014, background): “It was suggested, on statistical ground, that the radio bursts could be produced by magnetar hyper flares (Popov & Postnov 2007, 2013; Thornton et al. 2013).”
FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM THE INSPIRAL OF DOUBLE NEUTRON STARS (2016, background): “Up to now, 17 FRBs have been detected (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Burke-Spolaor & Bannister 2014; Spitler et al. 2014, 2016; Ravi et al. 2015; Petroff et al. 2015; Champion et al. 2015; Masui et al. 2015; Keane et al. 2016).”
A Nearby Repeating Fast Radio Burst in the Direction of M81 (2021, background): “Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, bright radio transients with unknown physical origins (Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013).”
CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources (2019, background): “Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a transient astrophysical phenomenon consisting of millisecondduration bursts of radio waves whose dispersion measures (DMs) imply cosmological origins (Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013).”
COSMOLOGICAL FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM BINARY WHITE DWARF MERGERS (2013, background): “Thornton et al. (2013) recently reported the detection of four fast radio bursts (FRBs), discovered in the high Galactic latitude region of the High Time Resolution Universe survey (Keith et al. 2010) using the 64-m Parks radio telescope at ∼ 1.5 GHz.”
Millisecond Magnetar Birth Connects FRB 121102 to Superluminous Supernovae and Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2017, background): “…less and dispersion measures DM ∼ 500 − 1200 pc cm−3 much larger than expected for propagation through the Galaxy or its halo (Lorimer et al. 2007; Keane et al. 2012; Thornton et al. 2013; Spitler et al. 2014; Ravi et al. 2015; Petroff et al. 2016; Champion et al. 2016; see Katz 2016 for a review).”
The Detection of an Extremely Bright Fast Radio Burst in a Phased Array Feed Survey (2017, background): “The early recognition of a likely cosmological origin of these bursts, based on their high dispersion measures, led to energy estimates in the range 1031–1033 J (Lorimer et al. 2007; Thornton et al. 2013).”