A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar
Abstract
Magnetars are highly magnetized young neutron stars that occasionally produce enormous bursts and flares of X-rays and gamma-rays. Of the approximately thirty magnetars currently known in our Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds, five have exhibited transient radio pulsations. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration bursts of radio waves arriving from cosmological distances. Some have been seen to repeat. A leading model for repeating FRBs is that they are extragalactic magnetars, powered by their intense magnetic fields. However, a challenge to this model has been that FRBs must have radio luminosities many orders of magnitude larger than those seen from known Galactic magnetars. Here we report the detection of an extremely intense radio burst from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB project. The fluence of this two-component bright radio burst and the estimated distance to SGR 1935+2154 together imply a 400-800 MHz burst energy of erg, which is three orders of magnitude brighter than those of any radio-emitting magnetar detected thus far. Such a burst coming from a nearby galaxy would be indistinguishable from a typical FRB. This event thus bridges a large fraction of the radio energy gap between the population of Galactic magnetars and FRBs, strongly supporting the notion that magnetars are the origin of at least some FRBs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2005.10324,
title = {A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar},
author = {FRB Collaboration and B. C. Andersen and K. M. Bandura and M. Bhardwaj and A. Bij and M. M. Boyce and P. J. Boyle and C. Brar and T. Cassanelli and P. Chawla and T. Chen and J. -F. Cliche and A. Cook and D. Cubranic and A. P. Curtin and N. T. Denman and M. Dobbs and F. Q. Dong and M. Fandino and E. Fonseca and B. M. Gaensler and U. Giri and D. C. Good and M. Halpern and A. S. Hill and G. F. Hinshaw and C. Höfer and A. Josephy and J. W. Kania and V. M. Kaspi and T. L. Landecker and C. Leung and D. Z. Li and H. -H. Lin and K. W. Masui and R. Mckinven and J. Mena-Parra and M. Merryfield and B. W. Meyers and D. Michilli and N. Milutinovic and A. Mirhosseini and M. Münchmeyer and A. Naidu and L. B. Newburgh and C. Ng and C. Patel and U. -L. Pen and T. Pinsonneault-Marotte and Z. Pleunis and B. M. Quine and M. Rafiei-Ravandi and M. Rahman and S. M. Ransom and A. Renard and P. Sanghavi and P. Scholz and J. R. Shaw and K. Shin and S. R. Siegel and S. Singh and R. J. Smegal and K. M. Smith and I. H. Stairs and C. M. Tan and S. P. Tendulkar and I. Tretyakov and K. Vanderlinde and H. Wang and D. Wulf and A. V. Zwaniga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.10324},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Submitted to Nature. This version: Geocentric arrival time corrected