Multiwavelength constraints on the origin of a nearby repeating fast radio burst source in a globular cluster

Creators: Pearlman, Aaron B.^{1, 2}; Scholz, Paul^{3, 4}; Bethapudi, Suryarao⁵; Hessels, Jason W. T.^{1, 6, 7}; Kaspi, Victoria M.¹; Kirsten, Franz^{7, 8}; Nimmo, Kenzie⁹; Spitler, Laura G.⁵; Fonseca, Emmanuel¹⁰; Meyers, Bradley W.^{11, 12}; Stairs, Ingrid H.¹²; Tan, Chia Min^{1, 11}; Bhardwaj, Mohit¹³; Chatterjee, Shami¹⁴; Cook, Amanda M.³; Curtin, Alice P.¹; Dong, Fengqiu Adam¹²; Eftekhari, Tarraneh¹⁵; Gaensler, B. M.^{3, 16}; Güver, Tolga¹⁷; Kaczmarek, Jane^{18, 12}; Leung, Calvin¹⁹; Masui, Kiyoshi W.⁹; Michilli, Daniele⁹; Prince, Thomas A.²; Sand, Ketan R.¹; Shin, Kaitlyn⁹; Smith, Kendrick M.²⁰; Tendulkar, Shriharsh P.^{21, 22, 23}

1. McGill University
2. California Institute of Technology
3. University of Toronto
4. York University
5. Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
6. University of Amsterdam
7. Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
8. Chalmers University of Technology
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
10. West Virginia University
11. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
12. University of British Columbia
13. Carnegie Mellon University
14. Cornell University
15. Northwestern University
16. University of California, Santa Cruz
17. Istanbul University
18. CSIRO Space and Astronomy, Parkes Observatory, Parkes, New South Wales, Australia
19. University of California, Berkeley
20. Perimeter Institute
21. Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
22. National Centre for Radio Astrophysics
23. Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

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Abstract

The precise origins of fast radio bursts (FRBs) remain unknown. Multiwavelength observations of nearby FRB sources can provide important insights into the enigmatic FRB phenomenon. Here we present results from a sensitive, broadband X-ray and radio observational campaign of FRB 20200120E, the closest known extragalactic repeating FRB source (located 3.63 Mpc away in an ~10-Gyr-old globular cluster). We place deep limits on the persistent and prompt X-ray emission from FRB 20200120E, which we use to constrain possible origins for the source. We compare our results with various classes of X-ray sources, transients and FRB models. We find that FRB 20200120E is unlikely to be associated with ultraluminous X-ray bursts, magnetar-like giant flares or an SGR 1935+2154-like intermediate flare. Although other types of bright magnetar-like intermediate flares and short X-ray bursts would have been detectable from FRB 20200120E during our observations, we cannot entirely rule them out as a class. We show that FRB 20200120E is unlikely to be powered by an ultraluminous X-ray source or a young extragalactic pulsar embedded in a Crab-like nebula. We also provide new constraints on the compatibility of FRB 20200120E with accretion-based FRB models involving X-ray binaries. These results highlight the power of multiwavelength observations of nearby FRBs for discriminating between FRB models.

Copyright and License

© 2024, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to B. Margalit for valuable and insightful discussions. We thank Z. Arzoumanian, K. Gendreau and E. Ferrara for prompt scheduling of these NICER observations. We also thank M. Snelders and D. Hewitt for their help with scheduling PRECISE/EVN observations. A.B.P. is a Banting Fellow, a McGill Space Institute (MSI) Fellow and a Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) postdoctoral fellow. V.M.K. holds the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology, a Distinguished James McGill Professorship, and receives support from a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery grant (RGPIN 228738-13), from an R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and from the FRQNT CRAQ. K.N. is an MIT Kavli Fellow. L.G.S. is a Lise-Meitner Max Planck independent group leader and acknowledges funding from the Max Planck Society. M.B. is a McWilliams fellow and International Astronomical Union Gruber fellow. M.B. receives support from the McWilliams seed grant. S.C. acknowledges support provided by NASA through grant HST-GO-16664 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A.M.C. is funded by an NSERC Doctoral Postgraduate Scholarship. A.P.C. is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar. F.A.D. is supported by the UBC Four Year Fellowship. T.E. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51504.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. B.M.G. acknowledges the support of NSERC, through grant RGPIN-2022-03163, and support from the Canada Research Chairs programme. T.G. is supported by the Turkish Republic, Presidency of Strategy and Budget project, 2016K121370. C.L. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51536.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. K.W.M. holds the Adam J. Burgasser Chair in Astrophysics and is supported by NSF grants (2008031 and 2018490). K.R.S. acknowledges support from a FRQNT doctoral fellowship. K.S. is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. S.P.T. is a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Gravity and Extreme Universe Program. A.B.P. acknowledges partial support for this work through NASA Grants 80NSSC21K0215 and 80NSSC21K2028. The AstroFlash research group at McGill University, University of Amsterdam, ASTRON, and JIVE is supported by: a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient Astrophysics (CERC-2022-00009); the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (‘EuroFlash’: grant agreement no. 101098079); and an NWO-Vici grant (‘AstroFlash’: VI.C.192.045). Pulsar and FRB research at UBC is funded by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by CIFAR. The Dunlap Institute is funded through an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. We acknowledge that CHIME is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan people.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Information: Supplementary discussion.

Data Availability

The NICER, XMM-Newton, Chandra and NuSTAR data can be accessed from the publicly available HEASARC archive. The data containing radio bursts B1–B9 from FRB 20200120E are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13359005 (ref. ¹¹⁸).

Code Availability

The following software packages were used to analyse the data presented in this paper: astropy⁹⁸, CIAO⁸⁷, dspsr⁶⁷, emcee⁹², FETCH⁶⁹, FTOOLS⁸³, HEASOFT⁸⁴, Heimdall⁶⁸, PRESTO⁷³, SFXC⁷¹, XMM-SAS⁸⁵ and XSPEC²⁵. The codes used for data processing and producing the figures may be made available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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