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28-02-2022
Burst timescales and luminosities as links between young pulsars and fast radio bursts
| Submitter: | Kenzie Nimmo, Jason Hessels, Franz Kirsten, Aard Keimpema et al. |
| Description: | Fast radio bursts (FRBs) remain an astrophysical enigma. What is producing these incredibly luminous and ephemeral radio flashes that we see originating from other galaxies? Ultra-high time resolution observations, on timescales of microseconds down to nanoseconds, can help us understand how FRB emission is made. That's because these incredibly short timescales probe small physical regions of space where the bursts are generated. With our PRECISE project we are not only localising FRBs to milli-arcsecond precision, but also using the raw voltage data to probe their properties on the shortest-attainable time scales. Most recently, we have targeted an FRB called FRB 20200120E, which we localised to a globular cluster in the M81 galactic system (see also this AJDI). In a companion paper complementing our localisation results, we were able to detect variations in the brightness of the FRB 20200120E signals on timescales as short as about 60 nanoseconds (this burst is shown in the image above). These short variations suggest that the emission is produced in a very tiny region, plausibly in the magnetic atmosphere (`magnetosphere') of a neutron star. Just as interestingly, the luminosities and durations of the bursts provide an observational bridge between FRBs and what we see from (young) pulsars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Where pulsar-like radio bursts end and FRB-like emission begins is not clear. What is certain, though, is that we are likely to find many new types of radio bursts if we continue to search for transients on these ultra-short timescales. If you'd like to read more about the results, then also check out these articles in Sky & Telescope (English) and the NRC (Dutch). |
| Copyright: | Daniëlle Futselaar / ASTRON |
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