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 $\sim 3 \times 10^{34}$ 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.

A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar

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CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief, bright, extragalactic radio flashes1,2. Their physical origin remains unknown, but dozens of possible models have been postulated3. Some FRB sources exhibit repeat bursts4–7. Although over a hundred FRB sources have been discovered8, only four have been localized and associated with a host galaxy9–12, and just one of these four is known to emit repeating FRBs9. The properties of the host galaxies, and the local environments of FRBs, could provide important clues about their physical origins. The first known repeating FRB, however, was localized to a low-metallicity, irregular dwarf galaxy, and the apparently non-repeating sources were localized to higher-metallicity, massive elliptical or star-forming galaxies, suggesting that perhaps the repeating and apparently non-repeating sources could have distinct physical origins. Here we report the precise localization of a second repeating FRB source6, FRB 180916.J0158+65, to a star-forming region in a nearby (redshift 0.0337 ± 0.0002) massive spiral galaxy, whose properties and proximity distinguish it from all known hosts. The lack of both a comparably luminous persistent radio counterpart and a high Faraday rotation measure6 further distinguish the local environment of FRB 180916.J0158+65 from that of the single previously localized repeating FRB source, FRB 121102. This suggests that repeating FRBs may have a wide range of luminosities, and originate from diverse host galaxies and local environments. Only one repeating fast radio burst has been localized, to an irregular dwarf galaxy; now another is found to come from a star-forming region of a nearby spiral galaxy.

A repeating fast radio burst source localized to a nearby spiral galaxy

The discovery of radio pulsars over a half century ago was a seminal moment in astronomy. It demonstrated the existence of neutron stars, gave a powerful observational tool to study them, and has allowed us to probe strong gravity, dense matter, and the interstellar medium. More recently, pulsar surveys have led to the serendipitous discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). While FRBs appear similar to the individual pulses from pulsars, their large dispersive delays suggest that they originate from far outside the Milky Way and hence are many orders-of-magnitude more luminous. While most FRBs appear to be one-off, perhaps cataclysmic events, two sources are now known to repeat and thus clearly have a longer lived central engine. Beyond understanding how they are created, there is also the prospect of using FRBs—as with pulsars—to probe the extremes of the Universe as well as the otherwise invisible intervening medium. Such studies will be aided by the high-implied all-sky event rate: there is a detectable FRB roughly once every minute occurring somewhere on the sky. The fact that less than a hundred FRB sources have been discovered in the last decade is largely due to the small fields-of-view of current radio telescopes. A new generation of wide-field instruments is now coming online, however, and these will be capable of detecting multiple FRBs per day. We are thus on the brink of further breakthroughs in the short-duration radio transient phase space, which will be critical for differentiating between the many proposed theories for the origin of FRBs. In this review, we give an observational and theoretical introduction at a level that is accessible to astronomers entering the field.

Fast radio bursts

Fast radio bursts (FRB) can arise from synchrotron maser emission at ultra-relativistic magnetized shocks, such as produced by flare ejecta from young magnetars. We combine PIC simulation results for the synchrotron maser with the dynamics of self-similar shock deceleration, as commonly applied to GRBs, to explore the implications for FRB emission. We assume the upstream environment into which the ultra-relativistic ejecta collides is a mildly relativistic baryon-loaded shell released following a previous flare, motivated by the high electron-ion injection rate Mdot ~ 1e19-1e21 g/s needed on larger scales to power the persistent radio nebula coincident with the repeating burster FRB 121102 and its high inferred rotation measure. The observed radio fluence peaks once the optical depth ahead of the shock to induced Compton scattering decreases to ~ 1e5 s between major ion-injection events needed to clear sufficiently low densities around the engine for FRB emission could explain prolonged "dark" periods and clustered burst arrival times, and lead to stochastic variation in the dispersion measure. Thermal electrons heated at the shock generate a short-lived <~ 1 ms (1 s) synchrotron transient at gamma-ray (X-ray) energies, analogous to a GRB afterglow.

Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aad188/pdf

M. Dobbs

Papers

CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources

The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview