Does the Galaxy contain sources of micro-FRB, lower energy events resembling the known FRB but detectable only at Galactic distances? The answer to this question is essential to determining the nature of FRB sources. At typical ($10$ kpc) Galactic distances a burst would be about 117 dB brighter than at a "cosmological" ($z = 1$) distance. The radiation of Galactic micro-FRB, if they exist, could be detected after Lunar reflection, or an upper bound on their rate set, by a modest (20 m at 1.4 GHz) radio telescope staring at the Moon. It would have all-sky sensitivity. The delay between detection of direct (by STARE2 or dipoles) and Lunar-scattered radiation would restrict a burst's position to a narrow arc.
Fast radio bursts are bright, unresolved and short flashes of radio emission originating from outside the Milky Way. The origin of these mysterious outbursts is unknown, but their high luminosity and short duration has prompted much speculation. The discovery that FRB 121102 repeats has enabled multiwavelength follow up, which has identified the host galaxy. VERITAS has observed the location of FRB 121102, including coincident observations with Arecibo. We present the results of a search for steady very high energy gamma-ray emission and the methodology for searching for short timescale, trans…
The repeating FRB 20121102A was localized to a star-forming region in a dwarf galaxy and found to be co-located with a persistent radio source (PRS). FRB 20190520B is only the second known source sharing phenomenology akin to FRB 20121102A's, with similar burst activity, host galaxy properties, as well as being associated with a PRS. PRS emission is potentially a calorimeter, allowing us to estimate the energy output of the central FRB engine. Independently of FRB studies, PRSs have been found in dwarf galaxies and interpreted as intermediate mass black holes. To improve our understanding of s…
Since their serendipitous discovery, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have garnered a great deal of attention from both observers and theorists. A new class of radio telescopes with wide fields of view have enabled a rapid accumulation of FRB observations, confirming that FRBs originate from cosmological distances. The high occurrence rate of FRBs and the development of new instruments to observe them create opportunities for FRBs to be utilized for a host of astrophysical and cosmological studies. We focus on the rare, and as yet undetected, subset of FRBs that undergo repeated bursts and are strongl…
Lunar occultation, which occurs when the Moon crosses sight-lines to distant sources, has been studied extensively through apparent intensity pattern resulting from Fresnel diffraction, and has been successfully used to measure angular sizes of extragalactic sources. However, such observations to-date have been mainly over narrow bandwidth, or averaged over the observing band, and the associated intensity pattern in time has rarely been examined in detail as a function of frequency over a wide band. Here, we revisit the phenomenon of lunar occultation with a view to study the associated intens…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are an enigmatic class of extragalactic transients emitting Jy-level radio bursts in the GHz band, lasting for only a few ms. So far, some objects are known to repeat while several others are not, likely indicating multiple origins. There are many theoretical models, some predict prompt VHE or optical emission correlated with FRBs while others imply VHE afterglows hours after the FRB. To test these predictions and unravel the nature of FRB progenitors, the stereoscopic Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) system MAGIC has been participating in FRB observati…
The radiation of a Fast Radio Burst (FRB) reflects from the Moon and Sun. If a reflection is detected, the time interval between the direct and reflected signals constrains the source to a narrow arc on the sky. If both Lunar and Solar reflections are detected these two arcs intersect, narrowly confining the source location on the sky. A previous paper calculated reflection by the Moon. Here we calculate the reflectivity of the Sun in the "flat Sun" approximation as a function of angle of incidence and frequency. The reflectivity is high at frequencies $\lessapprox 100\,$MHz and grazing incide…
Searching for Gamma Ray Bursts associated with CHIME Fast Radio bursts
Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院紫金山天文台）；School of Astronomy and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学天文与空间科学学院）；State Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy and Technology, Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院紫金山天文台射电天文与技术国家重点实验室）；South-Western Institute for Astronomy Research, Yunnan University（云南大学西南天文研究所）
Searching for links between energetic millisecond pulsars and repeating fast radio bursts
Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学安东·潘内科克天文学研究所）；ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所 ASTRON）；Department of Physics, McGill University（麦吉尔大学物理系）；Trottier Space Institute, McGill University（麦吉尔大学特罗蒂尔太空研究所）；Joint institute for VLBI ERIC（甚长基线干涉测量联合研究所 ERIC）；CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Australia Telescope National Facility（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织空间与天文部，澳大利亚望远镜国家设施）
Towards DM-free search for Fast Radio Bursts with Machine Learning -- I. An implementation on multibeam data
Guangzhou University（广州大学）；CSIRO Data61（CSIRO数据61）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学物理学院）；Institute of Astrophysics, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学天体物理研究所）；School of Astronomy and Space Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学天文与空间科学学院）；CSIRO Space and Astronomy（CSIRO空间与天文）
The physical origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is unknown. Young magnetars born from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been suggested to be a possible central engine of FRBs. We test such a hypothesis by systematically searching for GRB-FRB spatial associations from 110 FRBs and 1440 GRBs. We find that one FRB event, FRB 171209, discovered by the Parkes telescope is spatially coincident with a historical long-duration GRB 110715A at $z=0.82$. The afterglow of GRB 110715A is consistent with being powered by a millisecond magnetar. The extragalactic dispersion measure of FRB 171209 is in excess of t…
A handful of fast radio bursts (FRBs) are now known to repeat. However, the question remains --- do they all? We report on an extensive observational campaign with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), Parkes, and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, searching for repeat bursts from FRBs detected by the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients survey. In 383.2 hr of follow-up observations covering 27 FRBs initially detected as single bursts, only two repeat bursts from a single FRB, FRB 171019, were detected, which have been previously reported by Kumar et al. We use simul…
Simulating FRB Morphologies and Coherent Phase Correlation Signatures from Multi-Plane Astrophysical Lensing
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Trottier Space Institute, McGill University（麦吉尔大学特罗蒂尔太空研究所）；MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research（麻省理工学院卡弗里天体物理与空间研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院物理系）；Department of Astronomy, University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校天文系）
The nature of fast radio bursts (FRB) has been extensively debated. Here we investigate FRB121102, detected at Arecibo telescope and remarkable for its unusually large spectral index. After extensive study we conclude that the spectral index is caused by a nebula with free-free absorption. We find that putative nebula must lie beyond the Milky Way. We conclude that FRBs are of extra-galactic origin and that they arise in dense star-forming regions. The challenge with extra-galactic models is the the high volumetric rate of FRBs. This high rate allows us to eliminate all models of catastrophic …
The discovery of the `Lorimer Burst', a little over a decade ago, ignited renewed interest in searching for short-duration radio transients. This event is now considered to be the first established Fast Radio Burst (FRB), which is a class of millisecond-duration radio transients. The large dispersive delays observed in FRBs distinguish them from the individual bright pulses from Galactic pulsars, and suggests that they originate deep in extragalactic space. Amazingly, FRBs are not rare: the implied event rate ranges up to many thousands of events per sky, per day. The fact that only two dozen …
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright, millisecond-duration radio pulses whose origins are unknown. To date, only one (FRB 121102) out of several dozen has been seen to repeat, though the extent to which it is exceptional remains unclear. We discuss detecting repetition from FRBs, which will be very important for understanding their physical origin, and which also allows for host galaxy localisation. We show how the combination of instrument sensitivity, beamshapes, and individual FRB luminosity functions affect the detection of sources whose repetition is not necessarily described by a homogene…
We are conducting a search for new gamma-ray binaries by making high signal-to-noise light curves of all cataloged Fermi LAT sources and searching for periodic variability using appropriately weighted power spectra. The light curves are created using a variant of aperture photometry where photons are weighted by the probability that they came from the source of interest. From this analysis we find that the light curves of a number of sources near the ecliptic plane are contaminated by gamma-ray emission from the Moon. This shows itself as modulation on the Moon's sidereal period in the power s…
The V-FASTR experiment on the Very Long Baseline Array was designed to detect dispersed pulses of milliseconds duration, such as fast radio bursts (FRBs). We use all V-FASTR data through February 2015 to report V-FASTR's upper limits on the rates of FRBs, and compare these with re-derived rates from Parkes FRB detection experiments. V-FASTR's operation at lambda=20 cm allows direct comparison with the 20 cm Parkes rate, and we derive a power-law limit of γ<-0.4 (95% confidence limit) on the index of FRB source counts, N(>S)\propto S^γ. Using the previously measured FRB rate and the unprecedent…
Sub-arcsecond localization of the repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102 revealed its coincidence with a dwarf host galaxy and a steady (`quiescent') non-thermal radio source. We show that the properties of the host galaxy are consistent with those of long-duration gamma-ray bursts (LGRB) and hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae (SLSNe-I). Both LGRBs and SLSNe-I were previously hypothesized to be powered by the electromagnetic spin-down of newly-formed, strongly-magnetized neutron stars with millisecond birth rotation periods (`millisecond magnetars'). This motivates considering a scenario wh…
We report on a systematic search for hard X-ray and gamma-ray emission in coincidence with fast radio bursts (FRBs) observed by the AGILE satellite. We used 13 years of AGILE archival data searching for time coincidences between exposed FRBs and events detectable by the MCAL (0.4-100 MeV) and GRID (50 MeV-30 GeV) detectors at timescales ranging from milliseconds to days/weeks. The current AGILE sky coverage allowed us to extend the search for high-energy emission preceding and following the FRB occurrence. We considered all FRBs sources currently included in catalogues, and identified a sub-sa…
Magnetar hyperflares are the most plausible explanation for fast radio bursts (FRB) -- enigmatic powerful radio pulses with durations of several milliseconds and high brightness temperatures. The first observational evidence for this scenario was obtained in 2020 April when a FRB was detected from the direction of the Galactic magnetar and soft gamma-ray repeater SGR\,1935+2154. The FRB was preceded by two gamma-ray outburst alerts by the BAT instrument aboard the Swift satellite, which triggered follow-up observations by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.). H.E.S.S. has observed SG…
