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A nebular origin for the persistent radio emission of fast radio bursts

Nature volume 632, pages 1014–1016 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration, bright (approximately Jy) extragalactic bursts, whose production mechanism is still unclear1. Recently, two repeating FRBs were found to have a physically associated persistent radio source of non-thermal origin2,3. These two FRBs have unusually large Faraday rotation measure values2,3, probably tracing a dense magneto-ionic medium, consistent with synchrotron radiation originating from a nebula surrounding the FRB source4,5,6,7,8. Recent theoretical arguments predict that, if the observed Faraday rotation measure mostly arises from the persistent radio source region, there should be a simple relation between the persistent radio source luminosity and the rotation measure itself7,9. Here we report the detection of a third, less luminous persistent radio source associated with the repeating FRB source FRB 20201124A at a distance of 413 Mpc, substantially expanding the predicted relation into the low luminosity–low Faraday rotation measure regime (<1,000 rad m−2). At lower values of the Faraday rotation measure, the expected radio luminosity falls below the limit-of-detection threshold for present-day radio telescopes. These findings support the idea that the persistent radio sources observed so far are generated by a nebula in the FRB environment and that FRBs with low Faraday rotation measure may not show a persistent radio source because of a weaker magneto-ionic medium. This is generally consistent with models invoking a young magnetar as the central engine of the FRB, in which the surrounding ionized nebula—or the interacting shock in a binary system—powers the persistent radio source.

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Fig. 1: Images of the host galaxy of FRB 20201124A.
Fig. 2: SFR map of the FRB 20201124A host galaxy, as derived from GTC/MEGARA integral field spectroscopy.
Fig. 3: The proposed relation between the PRS specific radio luminosity and the FRB RM.

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Data availability

All relevant data used for this work are publicly available at the repositories of each facility. In particular, raw and calibrated VLA data can be downloaded from the NRAO data archive (https://data.nrao.edu/), NOEMA raw data are available at the IRAM Science Data Archive (https://iram-institute.org/science-portal/data-archive/) and GTC raw data at the Gran Telescopio Canarias Public Archive (https://gtc.sdc.cab.inta-csic.es/gtc/).

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant agreement no. 871158) B.O. gratefully acknowledges support from the McWilliams Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University. Y.-P.Y. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant no. 12003028 and the National SKA Program of China (2022SKA0130100). A.G. acknowledges financial support from the Severo Ochoa grant CEX2021-001131-S funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and from national project PGC2018-095049-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE). The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This work is partly based on observations carried out under project number W22BS with the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) interferometer. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany) and IGN (Spain). Partly based on observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), installed at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, on the island of La Palma. This work is partly based on data obtained with MEGARA/MIRADAS instrument, financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), through Programa Operativo Canarias FEDER 2014–2020. We thank A. G. de Paz (Facultad Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid) for his valuable support in the MEGARA data analysis. This research made use of APLpy, an open-source plotting package for Python hosted at http://aplpy.github.io. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for astronomy56.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IAPS – Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Rome, Italy

    Gabriele Bruni & Luigi Piro

  2. South-Western Institute for Astronomy Research, Yunnan University, Kunming, China

    Yuan-Pei Yang

  3. Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Yuan-Pei Yang

  4. Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Augusto Righi”, Università degli Studi di Bologna (UNIBO), Bologna, Italy

    Salvatore Quai

  5. Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna, INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Bologna, Italy

    Salvatore Quai, Eliana Palazzi, Luciano Nicastro, Sandra Savaglio & Andrea Rossi

  6. Nevada Center for Astrophysics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Bing Zhang

  7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Bing Zhang

  8. Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Trieste, Italy

    Chiara Feruglio & Roberta Tripodi

  9. IFPU: Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, Trieste, Italy

    Chiara Feruglio & Roberta Tripodi

  10. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Roberta Tripodi

  11. McWilliams Center for Cosmology & Astrophysics, Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Brendan O’Connor

  12. Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Granada, Spain

    Angela Gardini

  13. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università della Calabria, Arcavacata di Rende, Italy

    Sandra Savaglio

  14. Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), Frascati, Italy

    Sandra Savaglio

  15. Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Tautenburg, Germany

    Ana M. Nicuesa Guelbenzu

  16. IRA – Istituto di Radioastronomia, INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica), Bologna, Italy

    Rosita Paladino

Authors
  1. Gabriele Bruni
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  2. Luigi Piro
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Contributions

G.B. led the VLA and NOEMA observational campaigns, conducted the VLA data calibration, analysis and interpretation, and led the paper writing. L.P., Y.-P.Y., B.Z. and S.S. worked on the interpretation of the results. E.P., L.N., S.Q., A.M.N.G. and A.R. conducted the GTC/MEGARA observations, data analysis and interpretation. C.F. and R.T. worked on the NOEMA data calibration and analysis. B.O. realized the host galaxy broad-band SED fitting. A.G. led the GTC/MEGARA proposal. R.P. contributed to the NOEMA proposal preparation. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results presented and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gabriele Bruni.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Multifrequency radio image of the host galaxy of FRB 20201124A.

Overplot of the 6-GHz VLA image from ref. 14 (in colour) with contours from the 15-GHz (black) and 22-GHz (red) VLA images from this work. The purple cross indicates the host galaxy centre and the blue cross is the FRB position.

Extended Data Fig. 2 SEDs of the cold dust emission of FRB 20201124A.

Estimated values are based on the NOEMA upper limits at 236 GHz and 250 GHz (cyan squares). a, SED computed in one beam towards the FRB position as seen in the VLA 15-GHz map. The best-fitting curves with fixed [Tdust (K), β] = [20, 1.5], [20, 2.0], [30, 1.5], [30, 2.0] are plotted as solid violet, dashed violet, solid blue and dashed blue lines, respectively. b, SED of the cold dust emission of FRB 20201124A based on the NOEMA upper limits at 236 GHz and 250 GHz (cyan squares) computed for the region >3σ in the 6-GHz map. The best-fitting curves with fixed [Tdust (K), β] = [20, 1.5], [20, 2.0], [30, 1.5], [30, 2.0] are plotted as solid violet, dashed violet, solid blue and dashed blue lines, respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 3 GTC/MEGARA maps.

a, Galactic extinction corrected Hα emission line map. b, Map of the intrinsic E(B − V) of the galaxy. We estimated the intrinsic E(B − V) taking into account galactic dust extinction and using the Balmer decrement (Hα/Hβ). In cases in which the Hβ significance falls below a 2σ threshold, no accurate correction for dust extinction is possible. For these pixels, we give a lower limit for the intrinsic E(B − V), shown in greyscale. Note that the tick labels above the two colour bars represent lower limits and actual E(B − V) values for greyscale and coloured pixels, respectively. c, Maps of the emission lines [NII] 6584, Hβ and [OIII] 5007. In cases in which the line significance falls below 2σ we give an upper limit and represent these pixels in greyscale. The tick labels above the two colour bars represent upper flux limits and actual flux values for greyscale and coloured pixels, respectively. The red and black crosses represent the FRB and galactic centre, respectively. The magenta rectangle defines the galactic region encompassing six adjacent MEGARA pixels surrounding the FRB and PRS zone. For all of the maps, pixels with an Hα significance below a 3σ threshold are omitted.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Stacked GTC/MEGARA spectra.

From left to right, Hβ, [OIII] 5007 and Hα regions are presented. a, Stacked spectra from the six pixels in the FRB region (as shown in Extended Data Fig. 3). b, Stacked spectra of the entire galaxy. Individual spectra were shifted to align with the reference redshift (z = 0.0978) before stacking to compensate for any Hα-related velocity effect. Coloured vertical dotted lines mark the centroids of the three lines at the reference redshift. We observe an absorption line at approximately 5,493 Å. However, the nature of this spectral feature remains unrecognized by our analysis. This line is observed in each individual spectrum, too.

Extended Data Fig. 5 The PRS spectrum.

a, Radio spectra of the three PRSs known so far. b, Radio spectra of the PRS, the nuclear region of the host galaxy and the total emission of the host galaxy. In both panels, power-law fits are reported as solid lines, the green dashed lines indicate the maximum and minimum slope consistent with measurements within errors for the PRS presented in this work, the yellow triangles represent the NOEMA upper limits for FRB 20201124A and the blue shaded area represents the region not detectable by the VLA, in the range 1–50 GHz (we assume a representative r.m.s. = 1 μJy beam−1, reachable in about 10 h at 6 GHz).

Extended Data Table 1 Details of radio and GTC/MEGARA observations
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 FRB sample considered in this work
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Emission lines from the stacked spectra
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This Supplementary Information file provides an extension of the Methods section, in which we present the host galaxy characterization with GTC/MEGARA and its broad-band SED. The file includes Supplementary Figs. 1–5 and further references.

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Bruni, G., Piro, L., Yang, YP. et al. A nebular origin for the persistent radio emission of fast radio bursts. Nature 632, 1014–1016 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07782-6

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