Abstract
We present the discovery of FRB 20210410D with the MeerKAT radio interferometer in South Africa, as part of the MeerTRAP commensal project. FRB 20210410D has a dispersion measure DM = 578.78 ± 2 and was localized to subarcsec precision in the 2 s images made from the correlation data products. The localization enabled the association of the FRB with an optical galaxy at z = 0.1415, which when combined with the DM places it above the 3σ scatter of the Macquart relation. We attribute the excess DM to the host galaxy after accounting for contributions from the Milky Way's interstellar medium and halo, and the combined effects of the intergalactic medium and intervening galaxies. This is the first FRB that is not associated with a dwarf galaxy to exhibit a likely large host galaxy DM contribution. We do not detect any continuum radio emission at the FRB position or from the host galaxy down to a 3σ rms of 14.4 Jy beam-1. The FRB has a scattering delay of ms at 1 GHz, and exhibits candidate subpulses in the spectrum, which hint at the possibility of it being a repeating FRB. Although not constraining, we note that this FRB has not been seen to repeat in 7.28 h at 1.3 GHz with MeerKAT, 3 h at 2.4 GHz with Murriyang, and 5.7 h at simultaneous 2.3 GHz and 8.4 GHz observations with the Deep Space Network. We encourage further follow-up to establish a possible repeating nature.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2064-2077 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
Volume | 524 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 1 2023 |
Funding
Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a programme of NSF’s NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). The Gemini data were obtained from programs GS-2021B-Q-138 and GS-2022A-Q-143 (PI Tejos), and were processed with pypeit (Prochaska et al. ). A portion of this research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a Research and Technology Development Grant through a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. U.S. government sponsorship is acknowledged. MC would like to thank Clancy W. James for help with the zdm code. The authors would also like to thank the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory staff for their help with scheduling the observations. MC, BWS, KMR, TB, LND, SS, MM, VM, MS, and FJ acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 694745). MC acknowledges support of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (project number DE220100819) funded by the Australian Government and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. KMR acknowledges support from the Vici research program ‘ARGO’ with project number 639.043.815, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). WF, CK, JXP, ACG, SS, and NT as members of the Fast and Fortunate for FRB follow-up team acknowledge support from NSF grants AST-1911140 and AST-1910471. NT and LB acknowledge support by FONDECYT grant 11191217. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. The Parkes Radio Telescope (Murriyang) is managed by CSIRO. The FBFUSE beamforming cluster was funded, installed, and operated by the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. We acknowledge the Wiradjuri people as the traditional owners of the Parkes observatory site. We acknowledge the use of the ilifu cloud computing facility – http://www.ilifu.ac.za , a partnership between the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Stellenbosch, Sol Plaatje University, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. The ilifu facility is supported by contributions from the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA – a partnership between the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria and the University of the Western Cape), the Computational Biology division at UCT, and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA).
Keywords
- radio continuum: transients
- stars: neutron
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science