Sub-second periodicity in a fast radio burst
Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration flashes of radio waves that are visible at distances of billions of light-years. The nature of their progenitors and their emission mechanism remain open astrophysical questions. Here we report the detection of the multi-component FRB 20191221A and the identification of a periodic separation of 216.8(1) ms between its components with a significance of 6.5 sigmas. The long (~3 s) duration and nine or more components forming the pulse profile make this source an outlier in the FRB population. Such short periodicity provides strong evidence for a neutron-star origin of the event. Moreover, our detection favours emission arising from the neutron-star magnetosphere, as opposed to emission regions located further away from the star, as predicted by some models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.08463,
title = {Sub-second periodicity in a fast radio burst},
author = {FRB Collaboration and Bridget C. Andersen and Kevin Bandura and Mohit Bhardwaj and P. J. Boyle and Charanjot Brar and Daniela Breitman and Tomas Cassanelli and Shami Chatterjee and Pragya Chawla and Jean-François Cliche and Davor Cubranic and Alice P. Curtin and Meiling Deng and Matt Dobbs and Fengqiu Adam Dong and Emmanuel Fonseca and B. M. Gaensler and Utkarsh Giri and Deborah C. Good and Alex S. Hill and Alexander Josephy and J. F. Kaczmarek and Zarif Kader and Joseph Kania and Victoria M. Kaspi and Calvin Leung and D. Z. Li and Hsiu-Hsien Lin and Kiyoshi W. Masui and Ryan Mckinven and Juan Mena-Parra and Marcus Merryfield and B. W. Meyers and D. Michilli and Arun Naidu and Laura Newburgh and C. Ng and Anna Ordog and Chitrang Patel and Aaron B. Pearlman and Ue-Li Pen and Emily Petroff and Ziggy Pleunis and Masoud Rafiei-Ravandi and Mubdi Rahman and Scott Ransom and Andre Renard and Pranav Sanghavi and Paul Scholz and J. Richard Shaw and Kaitlyn Shin and Seth R. Siegel and Saurabh Singh and Kendrick Smith and Ingrid Stairs and Chia Min Tan and Shriharsh P. Tendulkar and Keith Vanderlinde and D. V. Wiebe and Dallas Wulf and Andrew Zwaniga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08463},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Updated to conform to the accepted version