FRB 20250316A: A Brilliant and Nearby One-off Fast Radio Burst Localized to 13 pc Precision

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank Lauren Rhodes for inspiring the RBFLOAT name and for helpful comments that increased the quality of the draft. We also thank Reshma Anna Thomas for inspecting burst candidates from realfast. We are deeply grateful to Keith Gendreau, Zaven Arzoumanian, and Elizabeth Ferrera for promptly scheduling the NICER observations and for their support of our work. This work benefited from early access to the scintillometry methods described in S. Pradeep E. T. et al. (2025), and we are grateful to Sachin Pradeep E. T. and coauthors for sharing it. We also thank Jillian Rastinejad, who kindly triggered the first epoch of the MMT observations under her ToO program. We also thank the statistics editor for providing valuable context on the limitations of Schmidt’s V/V_max method.

B.C.A. is supported by a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec—Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) Doctoral Research Award. M.B. is a McWilliams fellow and an International Astronomical Union Gruber fellow. M.B. also receives support from the McWilliams seed grants. A.M.C. is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher. A.P.C. is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar. M.D. is supported by a CRC Chair, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, CIFAR, and by the FRQNT Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ). Y.D. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-2234667. G.M.E. acknowledges funding from NSERC through Discovery Grant RGPIN-2020-04554. W.F. gratefully acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants AST-2206494 and AST-2308182 and CAREER grant AST-2047919, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through Cottrell Scholar award #28284. E.F. and S.S.P. are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant No. AST-2407399. J.W.T.H. and the AstroFlash research group acknowledge support from a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Transient Astrophysics (CERC-2022-00009), an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (“EuroFlash”; grant agreement #101098079), and an NWO-Vici grant (“AstroFlash”; VI.C.192.045). V.M.K. holds the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics & Cosmology, a Distinguished James McGill Professorship, and receives support from an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN 228738-13). C.L. acknowledges support from the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. K.W.M. holds the Adam J. Burgasser Chair in Astrophysics and received support from NSF grant AST-2018490. K.T.M. is supported by an FRQNT Master’s Research Scholarship. J.M.P. acknowledges the support of an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2023-05373). D.M. acknowledges support from the French government under the France 2030 investment plan as part of the Initiative d’Excellence d’Aix-Marseille Université—A*MIDEX (AMX-23-CEI-088). M.N. is a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec—Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) postdoctoral fellow. K.N. is an MIT Kavli Fellow. A.P. is funded by the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarships—Doctoral program. A.B.P. is a Banting Fellow, a McGill Space Institute (MSI) Fellow, and a FRQNT postdoctoral fellow. U.P. is supported by NSERC (funding reference number RGPIN-2019-06770, ALLRP 586559-23), Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), AMD AI Quantum Astro. Z.P. is supported by an NWO Veni fellowship (VI.Veni.222.295). M.W.S. acknowledges support from the Trottier Space Institute Fellowship program. K.R.S. is supported by a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec—Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) Doctoral Research Award. S.M.R. is a CIFAR Fellow and is supported by the NSF Physics Frontiers Center award 2020265. P.S. acknowledges the support of an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2024-06266). V.S. is supported by a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec—Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) Doctoral Research Award. K.S. is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. S.S. is supported by the joint Northwestern University and University of Chicago Brinson Fellowship. C.D.K. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF through AST-2432037, the HST Guest Observer Program through HST-SNAP-17070 and HST-GO-17706, and JWST Archival Research through JWST-AR-6241 and JWST-AR-5441. I.H.S. is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. D.C.S. is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2021-03985) and by a Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI) Collaborative Research Team Grant. F.K. acknowledges support from Onsala Space Observatory for the provisioning of its facilities/observational support. The Onsala Space Observatory national research infrastructure is funded through Swedish Research Council grant 2017-00648. A.V.F. and W.Z. are grateful for financial support from the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, Gary and Cynthia Bengier, Clark and Sharon Winslow, and Alan Eustace and Kathy Kwan (W.Z. is a Bengier–Winslow–Eustace Specialist in Astronomy).

We acknowledge that CHIME and the k’ni?atn k’l_⌣stk’masqt Outrigger (KKO) are built on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people. K’ni?atn k’l_⌣stk’masqt is situated on land leased from the Imperial Metals Corporation. We are grateful to the staff of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada. CHIME operations are funded by a grant from the NSERC Alliance Program and by support from McGill University, University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto. CHIME/FRB Outriggers are funded by a grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. We are grateful to Robert Kirshner for early support and encouragement of the CHIME/FRB Outriggers Project and to Dušan Pejaković of the Moore Foundation for continued support. CHIME was funded by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) 2012 Leading Edge Fund (Project 31170) and by contributions from the provinces of British Columbia, Québec, and Ontario. The CHIME/FRB Project was funded by a grant from the CFI 2015 Innovation Fund (Project 33213), contributions from the provinces of British Columbia and Québec, and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Additional support was provided by CIFAR, the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University, and the University of British Columbia. The CHIME/FRB baseband recording system is funded in part by a CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund award to I.H.S. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The Fast and Fortunate for FRB Follow-up team acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1911140, AST-1910471, and AST-2206490. FRB research at WVU is supported by NSF grants AST-2006548 and AST-2018490.

MMT Observatory access was supported by Northwestern University and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Observations reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, a joint facility of the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

This work is based in part on observations carried out using the 32 m radio telescope operated by the Institute of Astronomy of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland) and supported by a Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education SpUB grant. This work makes use of data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope owned by ASTRON. ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, is an institute of the Dutch Scientific Research Council NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). We thank the Westerbork operators Richard Blaauw, Jurjen Sluman, and Henk Mulder for scheduling and supporting observations. The Nançay Radio Observatory is operated by the Paris Observatory, associated with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and partially supported by the Region Centre in France. We acknowledge financial support from “Programme National de Cosmologie and Galaxies” (PNCG) and “Programme National Hautes Energies” (PNHE) funded by CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP, CEA and CNES, France.

KAIT and its ongoing operation were made possible by donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the NSF, the University of California, the Sylvia & Jim Katzman Foundation, and the TABASGO Foundation. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google, Inc.

The European VLBI Network is a joint facility of independent European, African, Asian, and North American radio astronomy institutes. Scientific results from data presented in this publication are derived from the following EVN project code: EN006 & EL071.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work made use of the Swinburne University of Technology software correlator, developed as part of the Australian Major National Research Facilities Programme and operated under licence. The NICER mission and portions of the NICER science team activities are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

We thank the staff of the GMRT that made these observations possible. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Facilities

CHIME - (FRB), EVN - European VLBI Network, GMRT - Giant Meter-wave Radio Telescope, KAIT - Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope, MMT - MMT at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, NRT - Nancay Decimetric Radio Telescope, Swift - Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission(XRT), VLA - Very Large Array, VLBA - Very Long Baseline Array, WSRT - Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.

Software References

photutils (L. Bradley et al. 2024).