The detection of an extremely bright fast radio burst in a phased array feed survey [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07581


We report the detection of an ultra-bright fast radio burst (FRB) from a modest, 3.4-day pilot survey with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. The survey was conducted in a wide-field fly’s-eye configuration using the phased-array-feed technology deployed on the array to instantaneously observe an effective area of $160$ deg$^2$, and achieve an exposure totaling $13200$ deg$^2$ hr. We constrain the position of FRB 170107 to a region $8’\times8’$ in size (90% containment) and its fluence to be $58\pm6$ Jy ms. The spectrum of the burst shows a sharp cutoff above $1400$ MHz, which could be either due to scintillation or an intrinsic feature of the burst. This confirms the existence of an ultra-bright ($>20$ Jy ms) population of FRBs.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Bannister, R. Shannon, J. Macquart, et. al.
Tue, 23 May 17
42/68

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ApJ letters