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

• Published in: arXiv.org 2017-05
• Main Authors: Bannister, Keith, Ryan, Shannon, Macquart, Jean-Pierre, Flynn, Chris, Edwards, Philip, O'Neill, Morgan, Osłowski, Stefan, Bailes, Matthew, Zackay, Barak, Clarke, Nathan, D'Addario, Larry, Dodson, Richard, Hall, Peter, Jameson, Andrew, Jones, Dayton, Navarro, Robert, Trinh, Joseph, Allison, James, Anderson, Craig, Bell, Martin, Chippendale, Aaron, Collier, Jordan, Heald, George, Heywood, Ian, Hotan, Aidan, Lee-Waddell, Karen, Madrid, Juan, Marvil, Joshua, McConnell, David, Popping, Attila, Voronkov, Maxim, Whiting, Matthew, Allen, Graham, Bock, Douglas, Brodrick, David, Cooray, Francis, DeBoer, David, Diamond, Philip, Ekers, Ron, Gough, Russell, Hampson, Grant, Harvey-Smith, Lisa, Hay, Stuart, Hayman, Douglas, Jackson, Carole, Johnston, Simon, Koribalski, Baerbel, McClure-Griffiths, Naomi, Mirtschin, Peter, Ng, Alan, Norris, Ray, Pearce, Sarah, Phillips, Chris, Roxby, Daniel, Troup, Euan Robert, Westmeier, Tobias
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Containment; Fluence; Phased arrays; Radio bursts
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.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.