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A second source of repeating fast radio bursts

Abstract

The discovery of a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) source1,2, FRB 121102, eliminated models involving cataclysmic events for this source. No other repeating FRB has hitherto been detected despite many recent discoveries and follow-ups3,4,5, suggesting that repeaters may be rare in the FRB population. Here we report the detection of six repeat bursts from FRB 180814.J0422+73, one of the 13 FRBs detected6 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB project7 during its pre-commissioning phase in July and August 2018. These repeat bursts are consistent with its origin from a single position on the sky, with the same dispersion measure, about 189 parsecs per cubic centimetre. This line of sight traces approximately twice the expected Milky Way column density of free electrons, which implies an upper limit on the source redshift of 0.1, showing it to be closer to Earth by a factor of at least 2 than FRB 1211028. In some of the repeat bursts, we observe subpulse frequency structure, drifting and spectral variation reminiscent of that seen in FRB 1211029,10, suggesting similar emission mechanisms or propagation effects. This second repeater, found among the first few CHIME/FRB discoveries, suggests that there exists—and that CHIME/FRB and other wide-field, sensitive radio telescopes will find—a substantial population of repeating FRBs.

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Fig. 1: Localization of FRB 180814.J0422+73.
Fig. 2: Radio profiles and frequency versus time (‘waterfall’) plots for the bursts of FRB 180814.J0422+73.

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Data availability

The data used in this publication are available at https://chime-frb-open-data.github.io/.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the warm reception and skilful help we have received from the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, operated by the National Research Council Canada. The CHIME/FRB Project is funded by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation 2015 Innovation Fund (Project 33213), as well as by the Provinces of British Columbia and Québec, and by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Additional support was provided by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), McGill University and the McGill Space Institute via the Trottier Family Foundation, and the University of British Columbia. The Dunlap Institute is funded by an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research & Innovation. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. P.C. is supported by an FRQNT Doctoral Research Award and a Mitacs Globalink Graduate Fellowship. M.D. acknowledges support from CIFAR, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery and Accelerator Grants, and from FRQNT Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ). B.M.G. acknowledges the support of the NSERC through grant RGPIN-2015-05948, and the Canada Research Chairs programme. A.S.H. is partly supported by the Dunlap Institute. V.M.K. holds the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics & Cosmology and a Canada Research Chair and receives support from an NSERC Discovery Grant and Herzberg Award, from an R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from CIFAR, and CRAQ. C.M. is supported by a NSERC Undergraduate Research Award. J.M.-P. is supported by the MIT Kavli Fellowship in Astrophysics and a FRQNT postdoctoral research scholarship. M.M. is supported by a NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Z.P. is supported by a Schulich Graduate Fellowship. S.M.R. is a CIFAR Senior Fellow and is supported by the NSF Physics Frontiers Center award 1430284. P.S. is supported by a DRAO Covington Fellowship from the National Research Council Canada. FRB research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by CIFAR.

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Nature thanks G. Hallinan and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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All authors on this paper played either leadership or significant supporting roles in one or more of the following: the management, development and construction of the CHIME telescope, the CHIME/FRB instrument and the CHIME/FRB software data pipeline, the commissioning and operations of the CHIME/FRB instrument, the data analysis and preparation of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to C. Ng.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Subpulse frequency drift rates.

a, b, Subpulse model fits for the 17 September CHIME/FRB burst (a) and the 28 October CHIME/Pulsar burst (b). Left to right, the lower subpanel shows dedispersed intensity data (DM = 189.4 pc cm−3), the best-fit model and residuals, and the upper subpanel shows the summed time series. Only the half of the receiver bandwidth in which the burst was detected is used in the analysis. The colour scale for the intensity data and residuals is clipped to ±3σ from the median of the residual data and a divergent rather than a sequential colour scale is used for the residuals to guide the eye. Red points overlaid on the models show the centre frequency and 1σ statistical uncertainty with a 10-MHz systematic error added in quadrature. The red dashed lines show linear drift rates of −6.4 MHz ms−1 (a) and −1.3 MHz ms−1 (b).

Extended Data Table 1 Subpulse parameters

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The CHIME/FRB Collaboration. A second source of repeating fast radio bursts. Nature 566, 235–238 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0864-x

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