Detection of a bright burst from FRB 121102 with Apertif at the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.
ATel #10693; L. C. Oostrum (ASTRON/UvA), J. van Leeuwen (ASTRON/UvA), J. Attema (NLeSC), W. van Cappellen (ASTRON), L. Connor (UvA/ASTRON), B. Hut (ASTRON), Y. Maan (ASTRON), T. A. Oosterloo (ASTRON), E. Petroff (ASTRON/UvA), D. van der Schuur (ASTRON), A. Sclocco (NLeSC) and M. A. W. Verheijen (RuG) report on behalf of the ARTS and Apertif Teams
on 1 Sep 2017; 15:17 UT
Credential Certification: Joeri van Leeuwen (leeuwen@astron.nl)
Subjects: Radio, Transient, Fast Radio Burst
We observed the repeating FRB 121102 (Spitler et al. 2016) while commissioning the Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS; van Leeuwen 2014) on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. Starting at UTC 2017-08-31 06:23:37, we recorded 300 MHz of bandwidth around 1.4 GHz from the central set of dipoles in the Apertif phased array feeds, from a single dish. The observation was the first with ARTS towards this source and lasted for 2 hours.
Data were coherently dedispersed at the known DM of 557 pc/cc, and channelised. Next, these filterbank data were searched offline for radio bursts, both in time and over a limited dispersion-measure range. At barycentric MJD 57996.2656372 ARTS detected a bright FRB, its first, with a fluence of 35 +- 10 Jy ms, a peak flux of 24 +- 7 Jy, and a FWHM of 1.3 +- 0.2 ms, at an optimized DM of 555 pc/cc. No further bursts were discovered in the observing session.
Following the detection of multiple bright pulses from FRB 121102 at higher frequencies with the Green Bank Telescope (ATel #10675) on 26 August, this detection indicates the FRB source may be in a phase of outburst.
Further details and plots are available at
http://www.alert.eu/FRB121102_20170831/
