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

Abstract

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 $8^{\prime }\times 8^{\prime }$ in size (90% containment) and its fluence to be $58\pm 6$ 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.

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ApJ letters. Version 2: Fixed galactic coordinates in Table 2