Radio Scattering Horizons for Galactic and Extragalactic Transients

Abstract

Radio wave scattering can cause severe reductions in detection sensitivity for surveys of Galactic and extragalactic fast ($\sim$ms duration) transients. While Galactic sources like pulsars undergo scattering in the Milky Way interstellar medium (ISM), extragalactic fast radio bursts (FRBs) can also experience scattering in their host galaxies and other galaxies intervening their lines-of-sight. We assess Galactic and extragalactic scattering horizons for fast radio transients using a combination of NE2001 to model the dispersion measure (DM) and scattering time ($\tau$) contributed by the Galactic disk, and independently constructed electron density models for the Galactic halo and other galaxies' ISMs and halos that account for different galaxy morphologies, masses, densities, and strengths of turbulence. For source redshifts $0.5\le z_{\mathrm{s}}\le 1$, an all-sky, isotropic FRB population has simulated values of $\tau (1\mathrm{GHz})$ ranging from $\sim 1\mu$s to $\sim 2$ ms ($90\%$ confidence, observer frame) that are dominated by host galaxies, although $\tau$ can be $\gg 2$ ms at low Galactic latitudes. A population at $z_{\mathrm{s}}=5$ has $0.01\lesssim \tau \lesssim 300$ ms at 1 GHz ($90\%$ confidence), dominated by intervening galaxies. About $20\%$ of these high-redshift FRBs are predicted to have $\tau >5$ ms at 1 GHz (observer frame), and $\gtrsim 40\%$ of FRBs between $z_{\mathrm{s}}\sim 0.5-5$ have $\tau \gtrsim 1$ ms for $\nu \le 800$ MHz. Our scattering predictions may be conservative if scattering from circumsource environments is significant, which is possible under specific conditions. The percentage of FRBs selected against from scattering could also be substantially larger than we predict if circumgalactic turbulence causes more small-scale ($\ll 1$ au) density fluctuations than observed from nearby halos.

27 pages, 16 figures, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (47)

• Cosmic Star Formation History
• 3D-HST+CANDELS: The Evolution of the Galaxy Size-Mass Distribution since $z=3$
• A New Electron Density Model for Estimation of Pulsar and FRB Distances
• The direct localization of a fast radio burst and its host
• A census of baryons in the Universe from localized fast radio bursts
• The First CHIME/FRB Fast Radio Burst Catalog
• An H-alpha Imaging Survey of Galaxies in the Local 11 Mpc Volume
• Rotation-Dependent Catastrophic Disruption of Gravitational Aggregates
• A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance
• A repeating fast radio burst source in a globular cluster
• A repeating fast radio burst associated with a persistent radio source
• The M31 Velocity Vector. II. Radial Orbit Towards the Milky Way and Implied Local Group Mass
• Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for their Progenitors
• A nearby repeating fast radio burst in the direction of M81
• Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts
• Characterizing the FRB host galaxy population and its connection to transients in the local and extragalactic Universe
• High star formation rates as the origin of turbulence in early and modern disk galaxies
• Astrophysics Milestones For Pulsar Timing Array Gravitational Wave Detection
• The evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function over the last twelve billion years from a combination of ground-based and HST surveys
• The z-DM distribution of fast radio bursts
• A High-Resolution View of Fast Radio Burst Host Environments
• Electron Density Structure of the Local Galactic Disk
• The Large Dispersion and Scattering of FRB 20190520B are Dominated by the Host Galaxy
• An absence of fast radio bursts at intermediate galactic latitudes
• Redshift Estimation and Constraints on Intergalactic and Interstellar Media from Dispersion and Scattering of Fast Radio Bursts
• Modeling Fast Radio Burst Dispersion and Scattering Properties in the First CHIME/FRB Catalog
• Constraining Galaxy Haloes from the Dispersion and Scattering of Fast Radio Bursts and Pulsars
• The Thousand-Pulsar-Array programme on MeerKAT III: Giant pulse characteristics of PSR J0540$-$6919
• Exploring the epoch of hydrogen reionization using FRBs
• Shocks in the Stacked Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Profiles of Clusters I: Analysis with the Three Hundred Simulations
• A Synoptic VLBI Technique for Localizing Non-Repeating Fast Radio Bursts with CHIME/FRB
• A Data-Driven Technique Using Millisecond Transients to Measure the Milky Way Halo
• The MASSIVE Survey VI: The Spatial Distribution and Kinematics of Warm Ionized Gas in the Most Massive Local Early-type Galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Understanding Ionized Gas Turbulence using Integral Field Spectroscopy of 4500 Star-Forming Disk Galaxies
• No Evidence for Galactic Latitude Dependence of the Fast Radio Burst Sky Distribution
• Fast Radio Burst Dispersion Measure Distribution as a Probe of Helium Reionization
• The Resolved Sunyaev--Zel'dovich Profiles of Nearby Galaxy Groups
• The Astrophysical Consequences of Intervening Galaxy Gas on Fast Radio Bursts
• Searching for pulsars in the Galactic Centre at 3 and 2 mm
• A population of compact radio variables and transients in the radio bright zone at the Galactic center observed with the Jansky Very Large Array
• Targeted search for young radio pulsars in the SMC: Discovery of two new pulsars
• Radio Detection of PSR J1813-1749 in HESS J1813-178: The Most Scattered Pulsar Known
• Magnetic fields in elliptical galaxies: an observational probe of the fluctuation dynamo action
• Multi-epoch searches for relativistic binary pulsars and fast transients in the Galactic Centre
• Detection of a dense group of hyper-compact radio sources in the central parsec of the Galaxy
• Multi-dimensional population modelling using frbpoppy: magnetars can produce the observed Fast Radio Burst sky
• The Thousand-Pulsar-Array programme on MeerKAT VII: Polarisation properties of pulsars in the Magellanic Clouds

Cited by in corpus (9)

• A sub-arcsec localised fast radio burst with a significant host galaxy dispersion measure contribution
• Deep Synoptic Array science: Two fast radio burst sources in massive galaxy clusters
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Technosignature Search of 97 Nearby Galaxies
• Gravitational lensing in the presence of plasma scattering with application to Fast Radio Bursts
• The dispersion measure and scattering of Fast Radio Bursts: contributions from multi-components, and clues for the intrinsic properties
• The BINGO Project IX: Search for Fast Radio Bursts -- A Forecast for the BINGO Interferometry System
• How limiting is optical follow-up for fast radio burst applications? Forecasts for radio and optical surveys
• Comprehensive analysis of the Apertif Fast Radio Burst sample: similarities with young, energetic neutron stars
• A Spatial Gap in the Sky Distribution of Fast Radio Burst Detections Coinciding with Galactic Plasma Overdensities