| 15th of October 2021 |
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| A "river" of FRBs |
| by Di Li et al. |
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An international research team captured an large series of Fast Radio
Bursts (FRBs) from the known repeating source FRB 121102, using the
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in
China. A total of 1,652 independent bursts were detected within 47
days in 2019. It is the largest set of FRBs reported to date, more
than the number reported in all other publications combined! Such a
high rate facilitates a statistical study of these FRB bursts. The
researchers found a clear characteristic energy, below which the
generation of the bursts became less efficient. The burst energy
distribution is bimodal, and can be modelled by a log-normal function
for low energy bursts and a Lorentz function for high energy bursts,
implying that weaker FRB pulses may be stochastic in nature and the
stronger ones involve a ratio between two independent quantities.
These results were published in Nature this week.
This project has been part of a long-running collaboration since the commissioning phase of the FAST telescope. Major partner institutions include Guizhou Normal University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Cornell University, Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, West Virginia University, CSIRO, University of California Berkeley, and Nanjing University. The image above depicts a "river" of bursts from a galaxy as recorded by the FAST telescope. The burst count and energies are shown in histograms, mimicking the painting "A Vast Land" by Ximeng Wang of the Song Dynasty (Image credit: NAOC) |