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Published May 12, 2023 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Magnetic field reversal in the turbulent environment around a repeating fast radio burst

Anna-Thomas, Reshma ORCID icon
Connor, Liam ORCID icon
Dai, Shi ORCID icon
Feng, Yi ORCID icon
Burke-Spolaor, Sarah ORCID icon
Beniamini, Paz ORCID icon
Yang, Yuan-Pei ORCID icon
Zhang, Yong-Kun ORCID icon
Aggarwal, Kshitij ORCID icon
Law, Casey J. ORCID icon
Li, Di ORCID icon
Niu, Chenhui ORCID icon
Chatterjee, Shami ORCID icon
Cruces, Marilyn ORCID icon
Duan, Ran ORCID icon
Filipovic, Miroslav D. ORCID icon
Hobbs, George ORCID icon
Lynch, Ryan S. ORCID icon
Miao, Chenchen ORCID icon
Niu, Jiarui ORCID icon
Ocker, Stella K. ORCID icon
Tsai, Chao-Wei ORCID icon
Wang, Pei ORCID icon
Xue, Mengyao ORCID icon
Yao, Ju-Mei ORCID icon
Yu, Wenfei ORCID icon
Zhang, Bing ORCID icon
Zhang, Lei ORCID icon
Zhu, Shiqiang ORCID icon
Zhu, Weiwei ORCID icon

Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief, intense flashes of radio waves from unidentified extragalactic sources. Polarized FRBs originate in highly magnetized environments. We report observations of the repeating FRB 20190520B spanning 17 months, which show that the FRB's Faraday rotation is highly variable and twice changes sign. The FRB also depolarizes below radio frequencies of about 1 to 3 gigahertz. We interpret these properties as being due to changes in the parallel component of the magnetic field integrated along the line of sight, including reversing direction of the field. This could result from propagation through a turbulent magnetized screen of plasma, located 10–5 to 100 parsecs from the FRB source. This is consistent with the bursts passing through the stellar wind of a binary companion of the FRB source.

Additional Information

© 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. https://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License. The Parkes (Murriyang) Radio Telescope is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities. D.L. and Y.F. are supported by NSFC grants 11988101, 12203045, and 11725313; by the National Key R&D Program of China 2017YFA0402600; and by Key Research Project of Zhejiang Lab 2021PE0AC03. R.A.-T., S.B.-S., and K.A. acknowledge support from NSF grant AAG-1714897. S.D. is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DE210101738) funded by the Australian Government. Y.-P.Y. is supported by NSFC grant 12003028. C.J.L. acknowledges support from NSF grant 2022546. P.B. was supported by a grant (2020747) from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel. S.B.-S. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program. W.Z. is supported by National SKA Program of China 2020SKA0120200 and the NSFC 12041303 and 11873067. P.W. is supported by NSFC grant U2031117, the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2021055), the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Reasearch (grant YSBR-006), and the Cultivation Project for FAST Scientific Payoff and Research Achievement of CAMS-CAS. J.-M.Y. is supported by the National Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (grant 2022D01D85) and the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (grant YSBR-063). L.Z. is supported by an ACAMAR Postdoctoral Fellowship and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 12103069). M.C., D.L., and W.Z. acknowledge support from the CAS-MPG LEGACY project. C.-W.T. is supported by NSFC grant 12041302. W.Y. is supported by NSFC grant U1838203. The GBT Epoch 2 observations were carried out through a time procurement agreement funded by a NSFC grant 11988101. Author contributions: R.A.-T., S.B.-S., C.J.L., Y.F., W.Y., and D.L. implemented the GBT observation campaign. S.D. and D.L. implemented the Parkes (Murriyang) observation campaign. R.A.-T., K.A., R.S.L., and S.B.-S. searched the GBT data for bursts; R.A.-T., L.C., and K.A. carried out analysis of their properties. S.D. searched the Parkes data for bursts and analyzed the burst properties. R.A.-T., L.C., Y.F., and Y.-K.Z. conducted the polarization analysis and visualization. R.A.-T., S.B.-S., L.C., D.L., Y.F., and S.D. led the interpretation of the results and writing of the manuscript. P.B., S.B.-S., L.C., and R.A.-T. produced the turblence model. Y.-P.Y. and B.Z. contributed theoretical investigation of the physical implications. All authors contributed to the analysis or interpretation of the data and to the final version of the manuscript. Data and materials availability: The data for each of the Parkes bursts are available at Science Data Bank (38), and data for the GBT bursts are available at Zenodo (39). The software and notebooks we used for the polarization analysis are available at https://github.com/ReshmaAnnaThomas/FRB20190520B and https://github.com/SukiYume/RMS and archived at Zenodo (40, 41). Our derived properties of the bursts are listed in table S2 for the polarized bursts and in table S3 for bursts with no detected polarization. The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Identifiers Funding Dates
Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023