A fast radio burst towards the millisecond pulsar PSR J1744-1134 found during a commensal search by the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
ATel #11851; S. Oslowski (Swinburne University of Technology - SUT), R. M. Shannon (SUT), A. Jameson (SUT), C. J. Russell (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - CSIRO), M. Bailes (SUT), N. D. R. Bhat (Curtin University of Technology), W. A. Coles (University of California San Diego), S. Dai (CSIRO), J. Dempsey (CSIRO), G. Hobbs (CSIRO), M. J. Keith (University of Manchester), M. Kerr (Naval Research Laboratory), R. N. Manchester (CSIRO), P. D. Lasky (Monash University - Monash), Y. Levin (Flatiron Institute), A. Parthasarathy (SUT), V. Ravi (Caltech Institute of Technology), D. J. Reardon (SUT), J. M. Sarkissian (CSIRO), R. Spiewak (SUT), W. van Straten (Auckland University of Technology), L. Toomey (CSIRO), J. B. Wang (XAO), L. Wen, (UWA), X. P. You (SU), L. Zhang (NAOC), S. Zhang, (PMO), X. J. Zhu (Monash)
on 14 Jul 2018; 15:18 UT
Distributed as an Instant Email Notice Transients
Credential Certification: Stefan Oslowski (stefanoslowski@swin.edu.au)
Subjects: Radio, Transient, Fast Radio Burst
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (Manchester et al. 2013) project monitors pulse times of arrival for 24 millisecond pulsars in the Galaxy on a fortnightly cadence. Since 2017 June, we have been commensally searching for fast radio bursts (FRBs) when timing pulsars with the 13-beam 20-cm multibeam receiver. These data are recorded with standard instrumentation (Keith et al., MNRAS, 2010) and searched in real time for FRBs using the Heimdall software (Barsdell et al. 2011).
On 2018-08-07 at 10:08:42.7 UTC (2018-07-10.4227164352), we detected a burst with a signal to noise ratio (S/N) of 22, at the dispersion measure (DM) of 1469.873 pc cm-3, in the field of the millisecond pulsar PSR J1744-1134 (DM = 3.14 pc cm-3). The burst was detected in beam 7 of the receiver, which at the time was pointed at a position of (RA, DEC = 17:46:12, -11:45:47; J2000). The burst width (full width at half maximum) was 1 ms and its inferred fluence was 5 Jy ms if at the centre of beam 7. We note that the location of the burst within the telescope beam is highly uncertain (> 0.25 deg); consequently, the fluence measurement is biased low (Macquart & Ekers 2017).
This position is approximately 8.7 degrees off of the galactic plane. The galactic contribution is estimated to be 257 pc cm-3 from the NE2001 model (Cordes & Lazio, 2001) and 223 pc cm-3 from the YMW16 model (Yao et al. 2017). Assuming host contribution to the DM of 100 pc cm-3, we estimate the redshift to be 1.6.
We encourage prompt follow-up with available facilities.
Two plots of the burst can be found here:
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~soslowski/FRB180714/
We used the interface available at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/pulsar/ymw16/ to estimate the redshift.
References:
Barsdell et al. 2012
Cordes & Lazio, 2001
Keith et al. 2010
Manchester et al. 2013
Macquart & Ekers 2017
Yao et al. 2017