Detection of two bright bursts from FRB20201124A with Apertif at the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.

ATel #15197; Pikky Atri (ASTRON), Anna Bilous (ASTRON), Joeri van Leeuwen (ASTRON), Yogesh Maan (NCRA), Ines Pastor-Marazuela (UvA, ASTRON), Emily Petroff (UvA, McGill) and Samayra Straal (NYUAD), on behalf of the ARTS and Apertif Teams
on 3 Feb 2022; 15:09 UT
Credential Certification: Joeri van Leeuwen (leeuwen@astron.nl)

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The ALERT survey for Fast Radio Bursts using the Apertif system on WSRT (Maan & van Leeuwen 2017, Oostrum et al. 2020) targets both new and known-FRB fields (Pastor-Marazuela et al. 2021). During a 3-hr pointing including the location of FRB20201124A (ATel #14497) starting Feb 1, 19:55:55 UTC, the ARTS real-time detection system (van Leeuwen et al. 2022) blindly detected two bright bursts. The bursts agreed with the position, dispersion measure, and recent activity (see, e.g. ATel #15192) of FRB20201124A; no other FRBs were found in this observation. The burst that occurred at MJD 59611.83542063 (barycentric) had a fluence of 156 +/- 31 Jy ms. The burst at MJD 59611.91172950 had a fluence of 35 +/- 7 Jy ms.

Both bursts consist of ~4 major components, and display rich spectro-temporal structure that best aligns at a dispersion measure of 410.9 +/- 0.2 pc/cm^3. The components drift downward in frequency, through the entire 300 MHz bandwidth centered on 1370 MHz. Interstellar scintillation is evident and consistent with bursts previously seen from this source (Main et al. 2021).

After this week Apertif will cease operations.

van Leeuwen, J., et al. 2022, Astronomy & Astrophysics, in prep.
Maan, Y., & van Leeuwen, J. 2017, Proc. URSI GASS, arXiv:1709.06104
Main, R. A., et al. 2021, arXiv:2107.14339
Oostrum, L. C., et al. 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 635, A61
Pastor-Marazuela, I., et al. 2021, Nature, 596, 505