A Distant Fast Radio Burst Associated with Its Host Galaxy by the Very Large Array

Creators: Law, Casey J.; Butler, Bryan J.; Prochaska, J. Xavier; Zackay, Barak; Burke-Spolaor, Sarah; Mannings, Alexandra; Tejos, Nicolas; Josephy, Alexander; Andersen, Bridget; Chawla, Pragya; Heintz, Kasper E.; Aggarwal, Kshitij; Bower, Geoffrey C.; Demorest, Paul B.; Kilpatrick, Charles D.; Lazio, T. Joseph W.; Linford, Justin; Mckinven, Ryan; Tendulkar, Shriharsh P.; Simha, Sunil

Abstract

We present the discovery and subarcsecond localization of a new fast radio burst (FRB) by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and realfast search system. The FRB was discovered on 2019 June 14 with a dispersion measure of 959 pc cm⁻³. This is the highest DM of any localized FRB and its measured burst fluence of 0.6 Jy ms is less than nearly all other FRBs. The source is not detected to repeat in 15 hr of VLA observing and 153 hr of CHIME/FRB observing. We describe a suite of statistical and data quality tests we used to verify the significance of the event and its localization precision. Follow-up optical/infrared photometry with Keck and Gemini associate the FRB with a pair of galaxies with r ∼ 23 mag. The false-alarm rate for radio transients of this significance that are associated with a host galaxy is roughly 3×10⁻⁴ hr⁻¹. The two putative host galaxies have similar photometric redshifts of z_(phot) ∼ 0.6, but different colors and stellar masses. Comparing the host distance to that implied by the dispersion measure suggests a modest (~ 50 pc/cm⁻³) electron column density associated with the FRB environment or host galaxy/galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2020 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 June 5; revised 2020 July 4; accepted 2020 July 8; published 2020 August 26. We thank the CHIME collaboration for supporting the analysis for this FRB and the NRAO for supporting realfast development and operations. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. C.J.L. acknowledges support under NSF grant 2022546. B.Z. acknowledges the support of Frank and Peggy Taplin Membership Fund. On behalf of the F4 team, J.X.P., A.M., N.T., K.E.H., and S.S. acknowledge support under NSF grants AST-1911140 and AST-1910471. S.B.S. and K.A. acknowledge support by NSF grant 1714897. S.B.S. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program. N.T. acknowledges support by FONDECYT grant 11191217. The NANOGrav project receives support from National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontier Center award number 1430284. P.C. is supported by an FRQNT Doctoral Research Award. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Some/all of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX13AC07G and by other grants and contracts. This research has made use of NASAs Astrophysics Data System. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSFs OIR Lab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). The Gemini GMOS and NIRI data were obtained from programs GN-2019A-Q-107 and GN-2020A-FT-201 (PI Spolaor), respectively, and it were processed using the Gemini's pyraf and dragons packages,23 respectively. Data were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among Caltech, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Keck Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Facilities: EVLA - Expanded Very Large Array, Pan-STARRS - , MAST - , Keck - , Gemini - , NOT. - Software: rfpipe (Law 2017), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018), aegean (Hancock et al. 2018), dragons, pypeit(Prochaska et al. 2019a), (Prochaska et al. 2019).

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