The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts II: New FRB discoveries and their follow-up

Abstract

SB would like to thank Tara Murphy, Martin Bell, Paul Hancock, Keith Bannister, Chris Blake and Bing Zhang for useful discussions. ; We report the discovery of four Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in the ongoing SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts at the Parkes Radio Telescope: FRBs 150610, 151206, 151230 and 160102. Our real-time discoveries have enabled us to conduct extensive, rapid multimessenger follow-up at 12 major facilities sensitive to radio, optical, X-ray, gamma-ray photons and neutrinos on time-scales ranging from an hour to a few months post-burst. No counterparts to the FRBs were found and we provide upper limits on afterglow luminosities. None of the FRBs were seen to repeat. Formal fits to all FRBs show hints of scattering while their intrinsic widths are unresolved in time. FRB 151206 is at low Galactic latitude, FRB 151230 shows a sharp spectral cut-off, and FRB 160102 has the highest dispersion measure (DM = 2596.1 ± 0.3 pc cm−3) detected to date. Three of the FRBs have high dispersion measures (DM > 1500 pc cm−3), favouring a scenario where the DM is dominated by contributions from the intergalactic medium. The slope of the Parkes FRB source counts distribution with fluences >2 Jy ms is α=−2.2+0.6−1.2 and still consistent with a Euclidean distribution (α = −3/2). We also find that the all-sky rate is 1.7+1.5−0.9×103 FRBs/(4π sr)/day above ∼2Jyms and there is currently no strong evidence for a latitude-dependent FRB sky rate. ; The Parkes radio telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array are part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project number CE110001020. The GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. VLAis run by theNational Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). NRAO is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work was performed on the gSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. gSTAR is funded by Swinburne and the Australian Government's Education Investment Fund. This work is also based on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. We thank the LSST Project for making their code available as free software at http://dm.lsstcorp.org. Funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 617199 (EP). Access to the Lovell Telescope is supported through an STFC consolidated grant. The 100-m telescope in Effelsberg is operation by the Max- Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie with funds of the Max-Planck Society. The Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) is funded by the Department of University and Research (MIUR), the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and the Autonomous Region of Sardinia (RAS) and is operated as National Facility by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). TB and RWW are grateful to the STFC for financial support (grant reference ST/P000541/1). Research support to IA is provided by the Australian Astronomical Observatory. The ANTARES authors acknowledge the financial support of the funding agencies: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), Commission Européenne (FEDER fund and Marie Curie Program), Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), IdEx program and UnivEarthS Labex program at Sorbonne Paris Cité (ANR-10- LABX-0023 and ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02), Labex OCEVU (ANR- 11-LABX-0060) and the A*MIDEX project (ANR-11-IDEX-0001- 02), Région Île-de-France (DIM-ACAV), Région Alsace (contrat CPER), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Département du Var and Ville de La Seyne-sur-Mer, France; Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany; IstitutoNazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM), Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), the Netherlands; Council of the President of the Russian Federation for young scientists and leading scientific schools supporting grants, Russia; National Authority for Scientific Research (ANCS), Romania; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO): Plan Estatal de Investigación (refs. FPA2015- 65150-C3-1-P, -2-P and -3-P, (MINECO/FEDER)), Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence and MultiDark Consolider (MINECO), and Prometeo and Grisolía programs (Generalitat Valenciana), Spain; Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Professional Training, Morocco. We also acknowledge the technical support of Ifremer, AIM and Foselev Marine for the sea operation and the CC-IN2P3 for the computing facilities. This work made use of data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's High Energy Astrophysics Division. This work is based in part on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. This paper makes use of software developed for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. We thank the LSST Project for making their code available as free software at http://dm.lsstcorp.org. RPE/MK gratefully acknowledges support from ERC Synergy Grant "BlackHoleCam" Grant Agreement Number 610058