| Description: | This figure is from Rowlinson & Anderson (2019, MNRAS Accepted) which explores the potential of detecting coherent radio emission from compact binary mergers. The diagram shows an illustration of the outcomes of a binary neutron star merger and the various coherent emission models as a function of the restframe timescale from the merger time.
During the inspiral phase (a), the gravitational waves may excite the surrounding plasma causing short duration radio emission (e.g. Moortgat & Kuijpers 2003) or brief flashes of radio emission can be caused by interactions between the magnetic fields of the neutron stars just prior to the merger (e.g. Lipunov & Panchenko 1996; Metzger & Zivancev 2016). When the two neutron stars merge, phase (b), they launch a highly relativistic jet that can produce a coherent burst of radio emission when interacting with the interstellar medium (Usov & Katz 2000). At this point, the merger remnant will either collapse to form a black hole or a millisecond spin period neutron star with strong magnetic fields (magnetar). If a neutron star is formed, phase (c), there may be standard pulsar dipole radiation powered by the spin down of the neutron star lasting for the lifetime of the neutron star (e.g. Totani 2013). Alternatively, the rapidly rotating neutron star may be able to produce repeating FRBs (e.g. FRB 121102; Spitler et al. 2016) while its spin and magnetic field remain sufficiently high (e.g. Metzger, Berger, & Margalit 2017). Finally, if the mass of the newly formed neutron star is too high, it will collapse to form a black hole producing a final FRB at the time of collapse (phase (d); Zhang 2014).
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