Burst timescales and luminosities as links between young pulsars and fast radio bursts
- Creators
- Nimmo, K.
- Hessels, J. W. T.
- Kirsten, F.
- Keimpema, A.
- Cordes, J. M.
- Snelders, M. P.
- Hewitt, D. M.
- Karuppusamy, R.
- Archibald, A. M.
- Bezrukovs, V.
- Bhardwaj, M.
- Blaauw, R.
- Buttaccio, S. T.
- Cassanelli, T.
- Conway, J. E.
- Corongiu, A.
- Feiler, R.
- Fonseca, E.
- Forssén, O.
- Gawroński, M.
- Giroletti, M.
- Kharinov, M. A.
- Leung, C.
- Lindqvist, M.
- Maccaferri, G.
- Marcote, B.
- Masui, K. W.
- Mckinven, R.
- Melnikov, A.
- Michilli, D.
- Mikhailov, A. G.
- Ng, C.
- Orbidans, A.
- Ould-Boukattine, O. S.
- Paragi, Z.
- Pearlman, A. B.
- Petroff, E.
- Rahman, M.
- Scholz, P.
- Shin, K.
- Smith, K. M.
- Stairs, I. H.
- Surcis, G.
- Tendulkar, S. P.
- Vlemmings, W.
- Wang, N.
- Yang, J.
- Yuan, J. P.
Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extragalactic radio flashes of unknown physical origin. Their high luminosities and short durations require extreme energy densities, such as those found in the vicinity of neutron stars and black holes. Studying the burst intensities and polarimetric properties on a wide range of timescales, from milliseconds down to nanoseconds, is key to understanding the emission mechanism. However, high-time-resolution studies of FRBs are limited by their unpredictable activity levels, available instrumentation and temporal broadening in the intervening ionized medium. Here we show that the repeating FRB 20200120E can produce isolated shots of emission as short as about 60 nanoseconds in duration, with brightness temperatures as high as 3 × 10⁴¹ K (excluding relativistic effects), comparable with 'nano-shots' from the Crab pulsar. Comparing both the range of timescales and luminosities, we find that FRB 20200120E observationally bridges the gap between known Galactic young pulsars and magnetars and the much more distant extragalactic FRBs. This suggests a common magnetically powered emission mechanism spanning many orders of magnitude in timescale and luminosity. In this Article, we probe a relatively unexplored region of the short-duration transient phase space; we highlight that there probably exists a population of ultrafast radio transients at nanosecond to microsecond timescales, which current FRB searches are insensitive to.
Additional Information
© 2022 Nature Publishing Group. Received 23 October 2021; Accepted 19 November 2021; Published 23 February 2022. We thank W. van Straten for help with digifil. The European VLBI Network is a joint facility of independent European, African, Asian and North American radio astronomy institutes. Scientific results from data presented in this publication are derived from the following EVN project code: EK048. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 730562 (RadioNet) and 101004719 (OPTICON–RadioNet Pilot). A.B.P is a McGill Space Institute Fellow and a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec—Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) postdoctoral fellow. B.M. acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under grant AYA2016-76012-C3-1-P and from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grants PID2019-105510GB-C31 and CEX2019-000918-M of the Institut de Ciències del Cosmos of the Universitat de Barcelona (Unidad de Excelencia 'María de Maeztu' 2020–2023). C.L. was supported by the US Department of Defense through the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program. D.M. is a Banting Fellow. E.P. acknowledges funding from a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Veni Fellowship. F.K. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council. FRB research at the University of British Columbia is supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. J.P.Y. is supported by the National Program on Key Research and Development Project (2017YFA0402602). K.S. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. K.W.M. is supported by a National Science Foundation Grant (2008031). M.B. is supported by an FRQNT Doctoral Research Award. N.W. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 12041304 and 11873080). P.S. is a Dunlap Fellow and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow. The Dunlap Institute is funded through an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. V.B. acknowledges support from the Engineering Research Institute Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre. Research by the AstroFlash group at University of Amsterdam, ASTRON and the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC is supported in part by an NWO Vici grant (principal investigator J.W.T.H.; VI.C.192.045). Data availability: The data that support the plots and results in this study are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5666802. Code availability: The code used for the analysis and figures in this work can be found here: https://github.com/KenzieNimmo/FRB20200120E_timescales. The phased-array branch of SFXC can be accessed here: https://github.com/aardk/sfxc/tree/phased-array. The bolometer branch of SFXC can be accessed here: https://github.com/aardk/sfxc/tree/bolometer. DSPSR (which contains digifil) can be installed from here: http://dspsr.sourceforge.net/. PSRCHIVE can be installed from here: http://psrchive.sourceforge.net/. For burst searches the required software is PRESTO (https://github.com/scottransom/presto), SpS (https://github.com/danielemichilli/SpS), Heimdall (https://sourceforge.net/projects/heimdall-astro/) and FETCH (https://github.com/devanshkv/fetch). Contributions: K.N. led the data analysis, made the figures and wrote most of the manuscript. J.W.T.H. guided the work and made important contributions to the writing and interpretation. F.K. discovered the bursts and contributed to the analysis of the voltage data. A.K. adapted the SFXC code to create coherently dedispersed voltage data at the native time resolution. J.M.C. provided important insights into the data analysis strategy. M.P.S., D.M.H. and R.K. played supporting roles in the data acquisition and analysis. All other authors contributed significantly to laying the groundwork for this study, or aspects of the data acquisition or interpretation. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Astronomy thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.Attached Files
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Supplemental Material - 41550_2021_1569_Fig9_ESM.webp
Supplemental Material - 41550_2021_1569_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 113894
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220311-567729500
- 730562 RadioNet
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 101004719
- European Research Council (ERC)
- McGill Space Institute
- Fonds de recherche du Québec - Nature et technologies (FRQNT)
- AYA2016-76012-C3-1-P
- Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO)
- PID2019-105510GB-C31
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MCINN)
- CEX2019-000918-M
- Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa
- National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- Swedish Research Council
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
- 2017YFA0402602
- National Key Research and Development Program of China
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- AST-2008031
- NSF
- 12041304
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- 11873080
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
- David Dunlap Family
- University of Toronto
- Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre
- VI.C.192.045
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- Created
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2022-03-11Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-03-17Created from EPrint's last_modified field