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An assessment of the association between a fast radio burst and binary neutron star merger

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 579–589 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright millisecond-duration radio bursts at cosmological distances. While young magnetars are the leading source candidate, recent observations suggest that there may be multiple FRB progenitor classes. Here we investigate a potential coincidence between a binary neutron star merger event, GW190425, and a bright, non-repeating FRB event, FRB 20190425A. The FRB is located within the gravitational wave sky localization area, occurred 2.5 h after the gravitational wave event and has a dispersion measure consistent with the distance inferred from gravitational wave parameter estimation. The chance probability of a coincidence between unrelated FRB and gravitational wave events in the searched databases is estimated to be 0.0052 (2.8σ). This potential association is consistent with the theory that the binary neutron star merger left behind a supramassive, highly magnetized compact object, which collapsed to form a black hole after losing angular momentum due to spindown and produced an FRB by ejecting the magnetosphere. If such a physical association is established, the equation of state of the post-merger compact object is likely to be stiff with a Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff non-spinning maximum mass of \(>2.6{3}_{-0.23}^{+0.39}\,{\mathrm{solar}}\,{\mathrm{masses}}\) (\(>2.3{1}_{-0.08}^{+0.24}\,{\mathrm{solar}}\,{\mathrm{masses}}\)) for a neutron (quark) star remnant.

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Fig. 1: Temporal and spatial coincidence of GW190425 and FRB 20190425A.
Fig. 2: The expected DM distribution inferred from GW190425 compared with non-repeating CHIME FRBs.
Fig. 3: Potential host association for GW190425–FRB 20190425A.
Fig. 4: Constraints on MTOV for neutron and quark stars.

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Data availability

Processed data are presented in Figs. 1–4, Extended Data Figs. 1–3, Extended Data Table 1 and Supplementary Table 1. The CHIME FRB data are publicly available at https://www.chime-frb.ca/catalog. The public GW event data are available at https://gracedb.ligo.org/superevents/public/O3/ (general information); https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-T1900685/public (strain data); https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P2000223/public (GWTC-2 parameter estimation); and https://www.gw-openscience.org/eventapi/html/GWTC-2/GW190425/v2 (GWOSC event portal).

Code availability

Custom code is available via GitHub at https://github.com/FRBs/zdm. Additional code used for processing data is available upon reasonable request from the corresponding authors.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the custodians of the land this research was conducted on, the Whadjuk (Perth region) Noongar people, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (https://www.gw-openscience.org/), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal and Spain. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, which is funded by NASA and operated by the California Institute of Technology; NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. This research has made use of the DSS-2 based on photographic data obtained using The UK Schmidt Telescope. The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council, until June 1988, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The DSS was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under US Government grant number NAG W-2166. A.M., F.H.P. and M.K. utilized the OzSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. The OzSTAR programme receives funding in part from the Astronomy National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) allocation provided by the Australian Government. L.W., F.H.P. and M.K. acknowledge funding support from Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) under grant number CE170100004. M.K. acknowledges the SIRF postgraduate scholarship from the University of Western Australia. C.W.J. acknowledges support from the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project DP210102103). S.A. and B.Z. acknowledge the Nevada Center for Astrophysics and a Top Tier Doctoral Graduate Research Assistantship at University of Nevada, Las Vegas for support. We acknowledge V. Savchenko and S. Driver for useful correspondence regarding the sGRB coincidence and galaxy luminosity function respectively, Q. Chu for her knowledge sharing of GW signal extraction, T. Slaven-Blair, T. Murphy, D. Dobie and H. Qiu for initial discussions relevant to this research, P. Sutton for valuable comments regarding the calculation of PS and V. Gupta for information regarding far sidelobe pulse detection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

    Alexandra Moroianu, Linqing Wen, Manoj Kovalam & Fiona H. Panther

  2. Department of Physics, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

    Alexandra Moroianu, Linqing Wen, Manoj Kovalam & Fiona H. Panther

  3. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia, Australia

    Clancy W. James

  4. Nevada Center for Astrophysics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Shunke Ai & Bing Zhang

  5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Shunke Ai & Bing Zhang

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  1. Alexandra Moroianu
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Contributions

A.M. led the GW–FRB coincidence search, GW190425/FRB 20190425A follow-up, chance probability (temporal and spatial) and significance analysis, drafted the initial paper and completed the manuscript. L.W. conceived the original idea for the work, designed the research framework, built the collaboration team, supervised all aspects of the analysis and contributed to the writing and completion of the paper. C.W.J. jointly conceived the original idea for the work, contributed to supervision of students on the project, performed the dispersion measure analysis, assisted with significance analysis and contributed to writing and completion of the paper. F.H.P. contributed the host galaxy search, GW parameter estimation, FRB energetics, sGRB context and paper writing, and Fig. 3 showing FRB–host galaxy coincidences. S.A. and B.Z. proposed the theoretical interpretation of the data, obtained constraints on MTOV for neutron stars and quark stars and contributed to the writing of the theory part of the paper. M.K. generated the approximated GW waveform, whitened the public GW strain data and performed matched filtering to construct the SNR time series.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alexandra Moroianu, Linqing Wen or Clancy W. James.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Flux-dispersion measure distribution of CHIME FRBs.

The majority of CHIME FRBs have flux densities below 5Jy. FRB 20190425A (orange square) resides in the low end of the DM spectrum, but has a somewhat exceptional flux density. Note that these flux densities are lower limits, as CHIME flux measurements are derived under the assumption that each burst is detected in the centre of the primary beam.

Extended Data Fig. 2 CHIME FRB detection rates.

Number NFRB of all (blue histogram) and non- repeating (orange histogram) CHIME FRBs per 5 days. Average rate during the period surrounding GW190425 (dashed black line) for all and non-repeating FRBs shown by the blue and red lines, respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Relevant probability distributions for p(DM∣GW190425) calculation.

From left to right: probability distribution of redshift z for GW190425 (from https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P2000223/public); and the probability distributions of the mean and standard deviation of the fitted lognormal FRB host galaxy DM distribution25.

Extended Data Table 1 Extragalactic sources within FRB 20190425A’s localization
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1.

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Moroianu, A., Wen, L., James, C.W. et al. An assessment of the association between a fast radio burst and binary neutron star merger. Nat Astron 7, 579–589 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01917-x

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