FRB 121102 : Closing in on a Fast Radio Burst Shami Chatterjee shami@astro.cornell.edu Casey Law claw@astro.berkeley.edu Jason Hessels J.W.T.Hessels@uva.nl Shriharsh Tendulkar shriharsh@physics.mcgill.ca Sarah Burke-Spolaor sspolaor@nrao.edu FRB 121102 : Closing in on a Fast Radio Burst

FRB 121102 : Closing in on a Fast Radio Burst Speakers: Shami Chatterjee, Casey Law, Jason Hessels, Shriharsh Tendulkar, Sarah Burke-Spolaor. Other team members also at this meeting: Matthew Abruzzo (undergrad), Elizabeth Adams, Geoff Bower, James Cordes, Paul Demorest, Vicky Kaspi, Joseph Lazio, Scott Ransom, Andrew Seymour, Robert Wharton (grad student).

FRB 121102: A Repeating Fast Radio Burst Shami Chatterjee Cornell University shami@astro.cornell.edu; (607) 279 2076 FRB 121102: A Repeating Fast Radio Burst

Fast Radio Bursts Millisecond bursts of radio waves. “Dispersed” – earlier at higher frequencies, later at lower. Excess dispersion  origin outside our Galaxy. One-off events. Pictured: FRB 010724 (Lorimer et al. 2007). Galactic dispersion; extragalactic dispersion.

So what? As unchanging as the heavens? Anything but! Five to ten thousand of these bursts over the sky every day. What could produce such bursts? Extreme physics. More models than detected bursts. It’s a fun puzzle. If indeed they are crossing the void between galaxies, they tell us about the intergalactic medium. If they are distant, where are the nearby sources?

FRB 121102: It repeats!  Rules out all cataclysmic or explosive models, at least for this one source. (Spitler et al. 2016)

But where is it? Arecibo detection beams cover dozens of sources.  A good place to go fishing with higher resolution observations!

Here we report … We have localized it! Bursts imaged with the Very Large Array. There’s a persistent, variable radio source at the burst position. Within ~10 milliarcseconds, with Arecibo + European VLBI Network. (But what is it?) Gemini: the FRB host galaxy is a dwarf at a redshift of z~0.2. The bursts are coming from 2.5 billion light years away.

FRB 121102 : Closing in on a Fast Radio Burst Shami Chatterjee shami@astro.cornell.edu Casey Law claw@astro.berkeley.edu Jason Hessels J.W.T.Hessels@uva.nl Shriharsh Tendulkar shriharsh@physics.mcgill.ca Sarah Burke-Spolaor sspolaor@nrao.edu High-Res Artwork: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v1rt8rx9cc5qbnb/AAA71nNscgiHy-dwncWwcpJ1a?dl=0 FRB 121102 : Closing in on a Fast Radio Burst