Fast radio burst repeaters produced via Kozai-Lidov feeding of neutron stars in binary systems

Abstract

Neutron stars are likely surrounded by gas, debris, and asteroid belts. Kozai-Lidov perturbations, induced by a distant, but gravitationally bound companion, can trigger the infall of such orbiting bodies onto a central compact object. These effects could lead to the emission of fast radio bursts (FRBs), for example by asteroid-induced magnetic wake fields in the wind of the compact object. A few percent of binary neutron star systems in the Universe, such as neutron star-main sequence star, neutron star-white dwarf, double neutron star, and neutron star-black hole systems, can account for the observed non-repeating FRB rates. More remarkably, we find that wide and close companion orbits lead to non-repeating and repeating sources, respectively, and they allow for one to compute a ratio between repeating and non-repeating sources of a few percent, which is in close agreement with the observations. Three major predictions can be made from our scenario, which can be tested in the coming years: 1) most repeaters should stop repeating after a period between 10 years to a few decades, as their asteroid belts become depleted; 2) some non-repeaters could occasionally repeat, if we hit the short period tail of the FRB period distribution; and 3) series of sub-Jansky level short radio bursts could be observed as electromagnetic counterparts of the mergers of binary neutron star systems.

21 pages, 7 figures, 3 appendices, accepted in A&A (November 26 2020)

References in corpus (20)

• A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar
• Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems
• Fast Radio Bursts
• The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems
• Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source
• INTEGRAL discovery of a burst with associated radio emission from the magnetar SGR 1935+2154
• A Second Source of Repeating Fast Radio Bursts
• Nine New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources from CHIME/FRB
• Suppression of extreme orbital evolution in triple systems with short range forces
• Observations of Fast Radio Bursts at Frequencies down to 400 Megahertz
• Challenges in Planet Formation
• Pulsar braking and the P-Pdot diagram
• Dense Stellar Populations: Initial Conditions
• Population synthesis of isolated Neutron Stars with magneto--rotational evolution
• Radio emissions from pulsar companions : a refutable explanation for galactic transients and fast radio bursts
• Secular dynamics in hierarchical three-body systems with mass loss and mass transfer
• Limit on the population of repeating fast radio bursts from the ASKAP/CRAFT lat50 survey
• Investigation of the asteroid-neutron star collision model for the repeating fast radio bursts
• Repeating fast radio bursts caused by small bodies orbiting a pulsar or a magnetar
• Constraints on fall-back disks in radio pulsars and anomalous X-ray pulsars

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Periodic Activities of Repeating Fast Radio Bursts from Be/X-ray Binary Systems
• Periodic repeating fast radio bursts: interaction between a magnetized neutron star and its planet in an eccentric orbit
• Earth-mass primordial black hole mergers as sources for non-repeating FRBs
• Enhanced particle acceleration in a pulsar wind interacting with a companion