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Published November 5, 2020 | Submitted + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

A fast radio burst associated with a Galactic magnetar

Abstract

Since their discovery in 2007, much effort has been devoted to uncovering the sources of the extragalactic, millisecond-duration fast radio bursts (FRBs). A class of neutron stars known as magnetars is a leading candidate source of FRBs. Magnetars have surface magnetic fields in excess of 10¹⁴ gauss, the decay of which powers a range of high-energy phenomena5. Here we report observations of a millisecond-duration radio burst from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154, with a fluence of 1.5 ± 0.3 megajansky milliseconds. This event, FRB 200428 (ST 200428A), was detected on 28 April 2020 by the STARE2 radio array in the 1,281–1,468 megahertz band. The isotropic-equivalent energy released in FRB 200428 is 4 × 10³ times greater than that of any radio pulse from the Crab pulsar—previously the source of the brightest Galactic radio bursts observed on similar timescales7. FRB 200428 is just 30 times less energetic than the weakest extragalactic FRB observed so far, and is drawn from the same population as the observed FRB sample. The coincidence of FRB 200428 with an X-ray burst favours emission models that describe synchrotron masers or electromagnetic pulses powered by magnetar bursts and giant flares. The discovery of FRB 200428 implies that active magnetars such as SGR 1935+2154 can produce FRBs at extragalactic distances.

Additional Information

© 2020 Nature Publishing Group. Received 12 May 2020; Accepted 21 September 2020; Published 04 November 2020. We thank the then director of OVRO, A. Readhead, for funds (derived from the Alan Moffet Funds) that allowed us to start this project. The Caltech and Jet Propulsion Laboratory President's and Director's Fund enabled us to build the second system at Goldstone and the third system near Delta, Utah. We are thankful to Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories for the second round of funding. C.D.B., a PhD student, was partially supported by the Heising-Simons foundation. We also thank S. Weinreb and D. Hodge for building the front-end and back-end boxes, J. Lagrange for support at GDSCC, J. Matthews and the Telescope Array Collaboration for assistance at Delta, and the entire OVRO staff, in particular J. Lamb, D. Woody and M. Catha, for support. We thank S. Phinney and W. Lu for comments on the manuscript. A portion of this research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research was additionally supported by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-1836018. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy. This research also used the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. Data availability: Data are available upon request. These data are in a public archive by the Caltech Library at http://doi.org/10.22002/D1.1647. Code availability: Custom code is available at https://github.com/cbochenek/STARE2-analysis. The code used to fit the burst profiles is available on request. Author Contributions: S.R.K., C.D.B., D.L.M., V.R., K.V.B. and G.H. conceived and developed the STARE2 concept and observing strategy. C.D.B., D.L.M., K.V.B., J.K. and S.R.K. led the construction and initial deployment of STARE2. C.D.B., D.L.M., K.V.B., V.R., J.K. and G.H. designed and built the STARE2 subsystems. C.D.B., D.L.M. and K.V.B. commissioned STARE2. C.D.B. operated STARE2, performed the localization and transient rate analyses, as well as the searches for sub-threshold events and events associated with other SGR flares. V.R. extracted the properties of the burst. C.D.B. and V.R. led the writing of the manuscript with the assistance of all co-authors. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature thanks Evan Keane and Amanda Weltman for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Attached Files

Submitted - 2005.10828.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41586_2020_2872_Fig4_ESM.webp

Supplemental Material - 41586_2020_2872_Fig5_ESM.webp

Supplemental Material - 41586_2020_2872_Fig6_ESM.webp

Supplemental Material - 41586_2020_2872_Fig7_ESM.webp

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Additional details

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August 22, 2023
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October 23, 2023