English

The repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102: Multi-wavelength observations and additional bursts

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2016-12-21 v2

Abstract

We report on radio and X-ray observations of the only known repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) source, FRB 121102. We have detected six additional radio bursts from this source: five with the Green Bank Telescope at 2 GHz, and one at 1.4 GHz at the Arecibo Observatory for a total of 17 bursts from this source. All have dispersion measures consistent with a single value (559\sim559 pc cm3^{-3}) that is three times the predicted maximum Galactic value. The 2-GHz bursts have highly variable spectra like those at 1.4 GHz, indicating that the frequency structure seen across the individual 1.4 and 2-GHz bandpasses is part of a wideband process. X-ray observations of the FRB 121102 field with the Swift and Chandra observatories show at least one possible counterpart; however, the probability of chance superposition is high. A radio imaging observation of the field with the Jansky Very Large Array at 1.6 GHz yields a 5σ\sigma upper limit of 0.3 mJy on any point-source continuum emission. This upper limit, combined with archival WISE 22-μ\mum and IPHAS Hα\alpha surveys, rules out the presence of an intervening Galactic HII region. We update our estimate of the FRB detection rate in the PALFA survey to be 1.11.0+3.7×104^{+3.7}_{-1.0} \times 10^4 FRBs sky1^{-1} day1^{-1} (95% confidence) for peak flux density at 1.4 GHz above 300 mJy. We find that the intrinsic widths of the 12 FRB 121102 bursts from Arecibo are, on average, significantly longer than the intrinsic widths of the 13 single-component FRBs detected with the Parkes telescope.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.08880,
  title  = {The repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102: Multi-wavelength observations and additional bursts},
  author = {P. Scholz and L. G. Spitler and J. W. T. Hessels and S. Chatterjee and J. M. Cordes and V. M. Kaspi and R. S. Wharton and C. G. Bassa and S. Bogdanov and F. Camilo and F. Crawford and J. Deneva and J. van Leeuwen and R. Lynch and E. C. Madsen and M. A. McLaughlin and M. Mickaliger and E. Parent and C. Patel and S. M. Ransom and A. Seymour and I. H. Stairs and B. W. Stappers and S. P. Tendulkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.08880},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

18 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ