http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.06099
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are intense radio flashes from the sky that are astonishingly characterized by millisecond durations and Jansky-level flux densities. Only 16 FRBs have been reported in the literature till now. We carry out a statistical analysis on these events. Their mean dispersion measure, after subtracting the contribution from the interstellar medium of our Galaxy, is found to be $\sim 655 \; \rm pc\,cm^{-3}$, strongly supporting the idea that they are of cosmological origin. Their energy release in radio band spans about three orders of magnitude, with a mean value of $\sim 6.42\times10^{38}$ ergs. The radio energy is found to be positively correlated with the observed fluence and the dispersion measure excess, and the fluence also shows a clear positive correlation with the FRB duration. Among all these events, FRBs 010621 and 010724 seem to form a distinct group in a few plots, indicating that there may be at lease two classes of FRBs. More interestingly, although the FRB study is still in a very early phase, the already considerable number of FRBs enables us to derive a useful luminosity function for them, i.e., $dN/dF_{\rm obs} = (4400 \pm 400) F_{\rm obs}^{-1.18\pm0.15} \; \rm sky^{-1}\,day^{-1}$, where $F_{\rm obs}$ is the observed radio fluence in units of Jy ms. We notice that the power-law index of 1.18 is significantly less than the expected value of 3/2 for homogeneous sources in a flat Euclidean space. Based on this luminosity function, it is estimated that the Chinese Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope will be able to detect about 5 FRBs for every 1000 hours of observation time.
L. Li, Y. Huang, Z. Zhang, et. al.
Mon, 22 Feb 16
4/42
Comments: 24 pages, 5 figures, comments welcome