No Radio Bursts Detected from FIRST J141918.9+394036 in Green Bank Telescope Observations

Abstract

Precise localization of the first-known repeating fast radio burst source, FRB 121102 (Spitler et al. 2016; Chatterjee et al. 2017), led to its association with a star-forming region inside a low-metallicity dwarf host galaxy (Tendulkar et al. 2017). This host environment is similar to that typically associated with long gamma-ray bursts (GRB) and superluminous supernovae, potentially linking these astrophysical phenomena (Metzger et al. 2017). In addition, the bursting source is found to be spatially coincident with a compact (< 0.7 pc; Marcote et al. 2017), persistent radio source (Chatterjee et al. 2017). Ofek (2017) identified similar radio sources in the Very Large Array FIRST survey (Becker et al. 1995). One of these sources, FIRST J141918.9+394036 (hereafter FIRST J1419+3940), was identified as a radio transient decaying in brightness by a factor of ~50 over several decades (Law et al. 2018). Very-long-baseline radio interferometric observations support the theory that FIRST J1419+3940 is the afterglow of a long GRB, based on the inferred physical size of the emission region (1.6 ± 0.3 pc; Marcote et al. 2019).

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