Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

FRB 010724 (the Lorimer Burst)

F&M was involved in the discovery and analysis of the first of these bursts reported, FRB 010724 (the Lorimer Burst), which was found in a Parkes survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud. For scientific details about FRB 010724, please consult "A Bright Millisecond Radio Burst of Extragalactic Origin" by D. R. Lorimer et al., Science, 318, 777 (2007).

For a layman's explanation, you can read the media report of the discovery in Strong Extragalactic Radio Burst Poses a Mystery at NPR's All Things Considered web site (the radio broadcast of the report is also there, and you can listen to that).

Three of our team members on this discovery (Bailes, Lorimer, and McLaughlin) were also honored with the 2023 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

FRB 121102 (aka "The Repeater")

F&M was also part of the discovery (and redetection) team for FRB 121102, the only FRB discovered to date with the Arecibo telescope and the only one observed so far to repeat its burst emission. For details about FRB 121102, see "Fast Radio Burst Discovered in the Arecibo Pulsar ALFA Survey" by L. G. Spitler et al., Astrophysical Journal, 790, 101 (2014)

The first followup detection of multiple bursts from the same source was published in "A Repeating Fast Radio Burst" by L. G. Spitler et al., Nature, 531, 202 (2016). On the Nature page there is also a nice audio interview with several researchers about this finding and other recent FRB science.

You can read news coverage of this redetection in several media outlets, including National Geographic, Scientific American, The Washington Post, USA Today, Sky and Telescope, Popular Science, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Later localization of this burst source using VLA follow-up observations was reported in "A Direct Localization of a Fast Radio Burst and Its Host" by S. Chatterjee et al., Nature, 541, 58 (2017).

Single pulse plots from some of the VLA phased-beam follow-up observations of the Arecibo FRB field are here:

• F&M plots produced from filterbank format data
• Chitrang's McGill plots produced from PSRFITS format data
• Plot of the VLA beam tiling coverage

Four FRBs from the Parkes 70-cm Survey Re-Analysis

We found four new FRBs in a reprocesing of the Parkes 70-cm Survey for pulsars. The new FRBs have several distinguishing features.

• All four of the FRBs discovered have significantly larger widths (> 50 ms) than almost all of the FRBs detected and cataloged to date.
• One of the FRBs has a DM of 3338 pc cm^-3, which is the largest DM measured for any FRB to date.
• These are the first FRBs detected by any radio telescope (so far), and they predate the Lorimer Burst by almost a decade.