A search for optical bursts from the repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102

Abstract

We present a search for optical bursts from the repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102 using simultaneous observations with the high-speed optical camera ULTRASPEC on the 2.4-m Thai National Telescope and radio observations with the 100-m Effelsberg Radio Telescope. A total of 13 radio bursts were detected, but we found no evidence for corresponding optical bursts in our 70.7-ms frames. The 5-sigma upper limit to the optical flux density during our observations is 0.33 mJy at 767nm. This gives an upper limit for the optical burst fluence of 0.046 Jy ms, which constrains the broadband spectral index of the burst emission to alpha < -0.2. Two of the radio pulses are separated by just 34 ms, which may represent an upper limit on a possible underlying periodicity (a rotation period typical of pulsars), or these pulses may have come from a single emission window that is a small fraction of a possible period.

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (22)

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• A repeating fast radio burst source localised to a nearby spiral galaxy
• Possible periodic activity in the repeating FRB 121102
• LOFAR Detection of 110-188 MHz Emission and Frequency-Dependent Activity from FRB 20180916B
• A sample of low energy bursts from FRB 121102
• Are all fast radio bursts repeating sources?
• Simultaneous multi-telescope observations of FRB 121102
• Constraints on the low frequency spectrum of FRB 121102
• Are Fast Radio Bursts Made By Neutron Stars?
• The multiwavelength counterparts of fast radio bursts
• An analysis of the time-frequency structure of several bursts from FRB121102 detected with MeerKAT
• Multiwavelength observations of Fast Radio Bursts
• Deep optical observations contemporaneous with emission from the periodic FRB 180916.J0158+65
• Zwicky Transient Facility constraints on the optical emission from the nearby repeating FRB 180916.J0158+65
• Constraining the X-ray - Infrared spectral index of second-timescale flares from SGR1935+2154 with Palomar Gattini-IR
• Statistical properties of the repeating fast radio burst source FRB 121102
• A search for short-term hard X-ray bursts in the direction of the repeating FRB 121102
• Prompt Detection of Fast Optical Bursts with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory
• Constraining the Fast Radio Burst (FRB) properties using the joint distributions of dispersion measure and fluence of the events detected at Parkes, ASKAP, CHIME and UTMOST
• A search for hard X-ray bursts occurring simultaneously to fast radio bursts in the repeating FRB 121102
• Energy and waiting time distributions of FRB 121102 observed by FAST