A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up

Creators: Petroff, E.; Burke-Spolaor, S.; Perley, D. A.; Kasliwal, M. M.

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the radio sky; their progenitors and origins remain unknown and until now no rapid multiwavelength follow-up of an FRB has been possible. New instrumentation has decreased the time between observation and discovery from years to seconds, and enables polarimetry to be performed on FRBs for the first time. We have discovered an FRB (FRB 140514) in real-time on 2014 May 14 at 17:14:11.06 UTC at the Parkes radio telescope and triggered follow-up at other wavelengths within hours of the event. FRB 140514 was found with a dispersion measure (DM) of 562.7(6) cm^(−3) pc, giving an upper limit on source redshift of z ≲ 0.5. FRB 140514 was found to be 21 ± 7 per cent (3σ) circularly polarized on the leading edge with a 1σ upper limit on linear polarization <10 per cent. We conclude that this polarization is intrinsic to the FRB. If there was any intrinsic linear polarization, as might be expected from coherent emission, then it may have been depolarized by Faraday rotation caused by passing through strong magnetic fields and/or high-density environments. FRB 140514 was discovered during a campaign to re-observe known FRB fields, and lies close to a previous discovery, FRB 110220; based on the difference in DMs of these bursts and time-on-sky arguments, we attribute the proximity to sampling bias and conclude that they are distinct objects. Follow-up conducted by 12 telescopes observing from X-ray to radio wavelengths was unable to identify a variable multiwavelength counterpart, allowing us to rule out models in which FRBs originate from nearby (z < 0.3) supernovae and long duration gamma-ray bursts.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 November 12. Received 2014 November 11; in original form 2014 September 14. Published: 12 December 2014. The data presented in this paper are made available through Research Data Australia4 and can be processed using the publicly available HEIMDALL single pulse processing software and the PSRCHIVE software package. The Parkes radio telescope and the ATCA are part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020. We thank the staff of the GMRT that made these observations possible. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Research with the ANU SkyMapper telescope is supported in part through ARC Discovery Grant DP120101237. We thank the Carnegie Supernova Project team (PI M. Phillips) and intermediate Palomar Transient Factory team (PI S. Kulkarni) for promptly taking follow-up data. Part of the funding for GROND (both hardware as well as personnel) was generously granted from the Leibniz-Prize to Professor G. Hasinger (DFG grand HA 1850/28-1). The Dark Cosmology Centre is supported by the Danish National Research council. We thank A. Krauss for prompt observations with the Effelsberg Radio Telescope. Partly based on observations made with the NOT, operated by the Nordic Optical Telescope Scientific Association at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. We thank the anonymous referee for valuable input which improved the clarity of this paper. EP would like to thank M. Murphy, J. Cooke, and C. Vale for useful discussion and valuable comments. NDRB is supported by a Curtin Research Fellowship. CD acknowledges support through EXTraS, funded from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 607452. MMK acknowledges generous support from the Hubble Fellowship and Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship. DM acknowledged the Instrument Center for Danish Astrophysics (IDA) for support. EOO is incumbent of the Arye Dissentshik career development chair and is grateful to support by grants from the Willner Family Leadership Institute Ilan Gluzman (Secaucus NJ), Israeli Ministry of Science, Israel Science Foundation, Minerva, Weizmann-UK and the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation. Support for DAP was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51296.01-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. BPS, CW, and PT acknowledge funding from the ARC via CAASTRO and grand LF0992131.

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