A fast radio burst in the direction of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy

Abstract

We report the real-time discovery of a fast radio burst (FRB 131104) with the Parkes radio telescope in a targeted observation of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy. The dispersion measure of the burst is 779 cm${}^{-3}$ pc, exceeding predictions for the maximum line-of-sight Galactic contribution by a factor of 11. The temporal structure of the burst is characterized by an exponential scattering tail with a timescale of 2.0${}_{-0.5}^{+0.8}$ ms at 1582 MHz that scales as frequency to the power $-$4.4${}_{-1.8}^{+1.6}$ (all uncertainties represent 95% confidence intervals). We bound the intrinsic pulse width to be $<0.64$ ms due to dispersion smearing across a single spectrometer channel. Searches in 78 hours of follow-up observations with the Parkes telescope reveal no additional sporadic emission and no evidence for associated periodic radio emission. We hypothesize that the burst is associated with the Carina dwarf galaxy. Follow-up observations at other wavelengths are necessary to test this hypothesis.

5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, accepted to ApJ Letters. Updated to match published version

References in corpus (8)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• Fast Radio Burst Discovered in the Arecibo Pulsar ALFA Survey
• The COS/UVES Absorption Survey of the Magellanic Stream. III: Ionization, Total Mass, and Inflow Rate onto the Milky Way
• The Galactic Position Dependence of Fast Radio Bursts and the Discovery of FRB 011025
• Sailing under the Magellanic Clouds: A DECam View of the Carina Dwarf
• Fast Radio Bursts: Constraints on the Dispersing Medium
• Dense plasma dispersion of fast radio bursts
• What Perytons Aren't, and Might Be

Cited by in corpus (28)

• A New Electron Density Model for Estimation of Pulsar and FRB Distances
• The Host Galaxy and Redshift of the Repeating Fast Radio Burst FRB 121102
• Fast Radio Bursts
• The magnetic field and turbulence of the cosmic web measured using a brilliant fast radio burst
• A "Cosmic Comb" Model of Fast Radio Bursts
• Dispersion Measure Variation of Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources
• FRB event rate counts I --- Interpreting the Observations
• Extracting host galaxy dispersion measure and constraining cosmological parameters using fast radio burst data
• Cosmology-independent estimate of the fraction of baryon mass in the IGM from fast radio burst observations
• A Bayesian Framework to Constrain the Photon Mass with a Catalog of Fast Radio Bursts
• A Fast Radio Burst Occurs Every Second throughout the Observable Universe
• The Fluence and Distance Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts
• A Machine Learning Classifier for Fast Radio Burst Detection at the VLBA
• Spectral Flattening at Low Frequencies in Crab Giant Pulses
• Probing motion of fast radio burst sources by timing strongly lensed repeaters
• Searching for giga-Jansky fast radio bursts from the Milky Way with a global array of low-cost radio receivers
• Energy function, formation rate and low-metallicity environment of fast radio bursts
• Radio light curve of the galaxy possibly associated with FRB150418
• Radio-interferometric monitoring of FRB 131104: A coincident AGN flare, but no evidence for a cosmic fireball
• Search for transient gravitational waves in coincidence with short duration radio transients during 2007-2013
• Neutron Star Physics in the Square Kilometer Array Era : An Indian Perspective
• Constraining Parameters in Pulsar Models of Repeating FRB 121102 with High-Energy Follow-up Observations
• Probing WHIM around Galaxy Clusters with Fast Radio Bursts and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect
• Wide-Band Spectra of Giant Radio Pulses from the Crab Pulsar
• Localising fast radio bursts and other transients using interferometric arrays
• Implications from the upper limit of radio afterglow emission of FRB 131104/Swift J0644.5-5111
• Pulsar magnetospheric convulsions induced by an external magnetic field
• The variance of dispersion measure of high-redshift transient objects as a probe of ionized bubble size during reionization