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Detection of ultra-fast radio bursts from FRB 20121102A

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 1486–1496 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extragalactic transient flashes of radio waves with typical durations of milliseconds. FRBs have been shown, however, to present a wide range of timescales: some show sub-microsecond sub-bursts while others last up to a few seconds. Probing FRBs on a range of timescales is crucial for understanding their emission physics, how to detect them effectively and how to maximize their utility as astrophysical probes. FRB 20121102A is the first known repeating FRB source. Here we show that FRB 20121102A produces isolated microsecond-duration bursts with durations less than one-tenth the duration of other currently known FRBs. The polarimetric properties of these microsecond-duration bursts resemble those of the longer-lasting bursts, suggesting a common emission mechanism producing FRBs with durations spanning three orders of magnitude. In detecting and characterizing these microsecond-duration bursts, we show that there exists a population of ultra-fast radio bursts that current wide-field FRB searches are missing due to insufficient time resolution. These results indicate that FRBs occur more frequently and with greater diversity than initially thought. This could also influence our understanding of energy, wait time and burst rate distributions.

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Fig. 1: Total-intensity dynamic spectra and profiles of the 8 ultra-FRBs.
Fig. 2: Histogram of the bursts’ durations, as they were found in the search.
Fig. 3: Full-polarization, frequency-averaged profiles and polarization position angles for a selection of bursts.
Fig. 4: Multi-burst joint QU-fit.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8112803 or from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The voltage data are available through the Breakthrough Initiatives Open Data Portal, https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/opendatasearch, and are explained in http://seti.berkeley.edu:8000/frb-data/.

Code availability

The pulsar package dspsr is available at https://dspsr.sourceforge.net/ and a modified version of dspsr, bl-dspsr, that can read voltage data from the Breakthrough Listen backend is available at https://github.com/UCBerkeleySETI/bl-dspsr. Code to splice and extract voltage data is available at https://github.com/greghell/extractor. FETCH can be found at https://github.com/devanshkv/fetch. The PRESTO suite of tools is available at https://github.com/scottransom/presto.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Breakthrough Listen project for keeping the raw baseband data from its observations and making them publicly available. Breakthrough Listen is funded by the Breakthrough Initiatives (https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/). We thank J. Weisberg for useful discussions about radio astronomy and polarimetry. A. D. Seymour is thanked for tips regarding the GBT BL data. Research by the AstroFlash group at University of Amsterdam, ASTRON and JIVE is supported in part by an NWO Vici grant (Principal investigator, J.W.T.H.; VI.C.192.045). K.N. is an MIT Kavli Fellow.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Dwingeloo, the Netherlands

    M. P. Snelders, J. W. T. Hessels & O. S. Ould-Boukattine

  2. Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    M. P. Snelders, J. W. T. Hessels, Z. Bensellam, L. P. Zwaan, P. Chawla & O. S. Ould-Boukattine

  3. MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    K. Nimmo

  4. Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, Onsala, Sweden

    F. Kirsten

  5. Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    J. T. Faber

  6. SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, USA

    V. Gajjar

  7. Breakthrough Listen, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    V. Gajjar

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  1. M. P. Snelders
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Contributions

M.P.S. led the burst search, data analysis, and made the figures and tables. He wrote the majority of the manuscript. K.N. made substantial contributions to the writing and provided guidance on the data analysis. J.W.T.H. supervised the work, guided the overall approach and made substantial contributions to the writing. All co-authors provided input on the scientific interpretation.

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Correspondence to M. P. Snelders.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Yi Feng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Peak S/N of the \(\mathbf{341.}\bar{\mathbf{3}}\)-ns profiles of bursts B30 and B43, as a function of DM.

The bursts were first coherently dedispersed to a DM of 560.1 pc cm−3 and thereafter incoherently dedispersed to a range of nearby trial DMs with a step size of 0.0002 pc cm−3. The peak S/N is determined for every DM and is shown with grey circles for B30 and grey pentagons for B43. For visual purposes, moving averages are shown with solid and dashed black lines for B30 and B43, respectively. A Lorentzian distribution is fit (solid green line) to the individual data points close to the peak of the profile of B30 and the best DM, 560.105 pc cm−3, is determined to be the centre of the fitted distribution (solid vertical line). Similarly, all the data points of B43 are fitted with a Gaussian distribution (solid orange line), which peaks at a DM of 560.308 pc cm−3 (dashed vertical line).

Extended Data Fig. 2 Dispersion measure (DM) comparison for the two brightest ultra-FRBs.

Burst B30 (panels a, b, c and d) and burst B43 (panels e, f, g and h) are coherently dedispersed to a DM of 560.105 pc cm−3 (left column) and 560.308 pc cm−3 (right column). The dynamic spectra (panels b, d, f and h) have a time resolution of \(341.\bar{3}\) ns and a frequency resolution of 2.9296875 MHz. The dashed red lines indicate the frequency range that was averaged over to create the burst profiles, which also have a time resolution of \(341.\bar{3}\) ns (panels a, c, e and g). Using a DM of 560.308 pc cm−3 slightly increases the peak S/N of burst B43 and the width of burst B43 decreases by about 2 μs. However, using a DM of 560.308 pc cm−3, burst B30 is clearly over-dedispersed (panel d).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Detection duration as a function of time.

Every FRB is found in multiple subbands and/or trial boxcar widths (Methods). Both the colour shading and the size of the data points correspond to the S/N of the burst detection, with larger/darker dots indicating a higher S/N. Colours indicate whether the bursts have been found before by Gajjar et al.19 and Zhang et al.34.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Spectral extent as a function of time.

Every FRB is found in multiple subbands and/or trial boxcar widths (Methods). For every burst detection we plot a rectangle showing the frequency range of the corresponding subband and a 2-second time interval around the burst arrival time. Every rectangle has the same transparency and the colours become darker as multiple patches are plotted on top of each other. Colours indicate whether the bursts have been found before by Gajjar et al.19 and Zhang et al.34.

Extended Data Fig. 5 The transient phase space for coherent radio emission.

The transient duration (width times the central frequency of the burst) and the isotropic-equivalent spectral luminosity of the 8 ultra-FRBs shown in Fig. 1 are plotted as red stars. A selection of published localized repeating FRBs are plotted as crosses. Radio bursts from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 are shown as purple plusses. The pulsar and Rotating RAdio Transient (RRAT) population are shown as pink and magenta circles, respectively. Giant radio pulses (GRPs) and ‘nanoshots’ of the Crab pulsar are shown as orange and yellow circles, respectively. The diagonal grey lines represent levels of constant brightness temperature. The three data points from FRB 20200120E that have a brightness temperature of > 1040 K are from bursts that show short temporal structure within a broader burst envelope33. Based on a figure presented in Nimmo et al.33 (see references therein).

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–3.

Supplementary Data 1

Computer-readable version of Supplementary Table 3. Table encapsulates the search strategy: Dispersion measure (DM) range, DM step-size, number of channels, number of ‘subbands’, time resolution, bandwidth and frequency range.

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Snelders, M.P., Nimmo, K., Hessels, J.W.T. et al. Detection of ultra-fast radio bursts from FRB 20121102A. Nat Astron 7, 1486–1496 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02101-x

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