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Magnetospheric origin of a fast radio burst constrained using scintillation

Nature volume 637, pages 48–51 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are microsecond-to-millisecond-duration radio transients1 that originate mostly from extragalactic distances. The FRB emission mechanism remains debated, with two main competing classes of models: physical processes that occur within close proximity to a central engine2,3,4; and relativistic shocks that propagate out to large radial distances5,6,7,8. The expected emission-region sizes are notably different between these two types of models9. Here we present the measurement of two mutually coherent scintillation scales in the frequency spectrum of FRB 20221022A10: one originating from a scattering screen located within the Milky Way, and the second originating from its host galaxy or local environment. We use the scattering media as an astrophysical lens to constrain the size of the observed FRB lateral emission region9 to ≲3 × 104 kilometres. This emission size is inconsistent with the expectation for the large-radial-distance models5,6,7,8, and is more naturally explained by an emission process that operates within or just beyond the magnetosphere of a central compact object. Recently, FRB 20221022A was found to exhibit an S-shaped polarization angle swing10, most likely originating from a magnetospheric emission process. The scintillation results presented in this work independently support this conclusion, while highlighting scintillation as a useful tool in our understanding of FRB emission physics and progenitors.

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Fig. 1: Three frequency scales evident in the full-band ACF of the FRB 20221022A spectrum.
Fig. 2: Confirming two scintillation scales in the FRB 20221022A spectrum, with decorrelation bandwidths 6 ± 1 kHz and 128 ± 6 kHz at 600 MHz.
Fig. 3: The degeneracy between the lateral emission-region size and the FRB to extragalactic screen distance.

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Data availability

The beamformed baseband CHIME FRB data presented in this work are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13954067 (ref. 75). The European VLBI Network data are available on the JIVE archive (project ID RN002).

Code availability

We have made the spectral analysis code available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/KenzieNimmo/FRB20221022A_scintillation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Marcote for help with the EVN observations; R. Karuppusamy for help with the pulsar backend recording at Effelsberg; D. Jow for discussions about anisotropic screens; J. Cordes and S. Ocker for answering questions about NE2001; and J. Hessels for discussions. K.N. is an MIT Kavli Fellow. Z.P. was a Dunlap Fellow and is supported by an NWO Veni fellowship (VI.Veni.222.295). P.B. is supported by a grant (number 2020747) from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel by a grant (number 1649/23) from the Israel Science Foundation and by a grant (number 80NSSC 24K0770) from the NASA astrophysics theory programme. P.K. is supported in part by an NSF grant AST-2009619 and a NASA grant 80NSSC24K0770. M.W.S. acknowledges support from the Trottier Space Institute Fellowship programme. A.P.C. is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar. The Dunlap Institute is funded through an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. B.M.G. acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through grant RGPIN-2022-03163, and of the Canada Research Chairs programme. V.M.K. holds the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology, a Distinguished James McGill Professorship, and receives support from an NSERC Discovery grant (RGPIN 228738-13), from an R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from CIFAR, and from the FRQNT CRAQ. C.L. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51536.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. K.W.M. holds the Adam J. Burgasser Chair in Astrophysics and is supported by NSF grants (2008031 and 2018490). A.P. is funded by the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarships – Doctoral programme. A.B.P. is a Banting Fellow, a McGill Space Institute (MSI) Fellow, and a Fonds de Recherche du Quebec – Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) postdoctoral fellow. K.S. is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. FRB research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The baseband recording system on CHIME/FRB is funded in part by a CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund grant to IHS. We thank the directors and staff at the various participating EVN stations for allowing us to use their facilities and running the observations. The European VLBI Network is a joint facility of independent European, African, Asian and North American radio astronomy institutes. Scientific results from data presented in this publication are derived from the following EVN project code: RN002.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Kenzie Nimmo, Adam E. Lanman, Shion Andrew, Kiyoshi W. Masui, Daniele Michilli & Kaitlyn Shin

  2. Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Ziggy Pleunis, B. M. Gaensler, Mattias Lazda & Ayush Pandhi

  3. Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ziggy Pleunis

  4. ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands

    Ziggy Pleunis

  5. Department of Natural Sciences, The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel

    Paz Beniamini

  6. Astrophysics Research Center of the Open university (ARCO), The Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel

    Paz Beniamini

  7. Department of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Pawan Kumar

  8. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Adam E. Lanman, Shion Andrew, Kiyoshi W. Masui, Daniele Michilli & Kaitlyn Shin

  9. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    D. Z. Li

  10. Trottier Space Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Robert Main, Mawson W. Sammons, Alice P. Curtin, Ronniy C. Joseph, Zarif Kader, Victoria M. Kaspi, Ryan Mckinven, Aaron B. Pearlman, Masoud Rafiei-Ravandi & Ketan R. Sand

  11. Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Robert Main, Mawson W. Sammons, Alice P. Curtin, Ronniy C. Joseph, Zarif Kader, Victoria M. Kaspi, Ryan Mckinven, Aaron B. Pearlman, Masoud Rafiei-Ravandi & Ketan R. Sand

  12. McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Mohit Bhardwaj

  13. Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Shami Chatterjee

  14. Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Emmanuel Fonseca

  15. Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Emmanuel Fonseca

  16. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    B. M. Gaensler, Mattias Lazda & Ayush Pandhi

  17. David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    B. M. Gaensler

  18. Department of Astronomy, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Calvin Leung

  19. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Kendrick Smith

  20. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Ingrid H. Stairs

Authors
  1. Kenzie Nimmo
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  2. Ziggy Pleunis
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Contributions

K.N. led the data analysis, interpretation and writing of the paper. Z.P. guided the analysis, and contributed to the interpretation and writing. P.B. and P.K. suggested the search for scintillation in CHIME FRBs, and contributed to the emission physics interpretation. A.E.L., D.Z.L., R.M. and M.W.S. provided substantial guidance regarding the analysis strategy, the mathematical framework and the interpretation of the results. S.A., M.B., S.C., A.P.C., E.F., B.M.G., R.C.J., Z.K., V.M.K., M.L., C.L., K.W.M., R.M., D.M., A.P., A.B.P., M.R.-R., K.R.S., K. Shin, K. Smith and I.H.S. contributed to the discovery of the FRB source and acquisition of data through the building or maintenance of the CHIME telescope and commented on the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kenzie Nimmo.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature thanks Casey Law and Di Li for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 FRB 20221022A burst dynamic spectrum (panel c), profile (panel b), spectrum (panel d) and modulation index (panel a).

The burst is dedispersed to a dispersion measure10 of 116.837 pc cm−3 and is plotted with time and frequency resolution 40.96 μs and 6.2 MHz, respectively. The rise and decay time are highlighted using the shaded red regions in b. Both the on-burst time-averaged spectrum and off-burst spectrum are shown in d. For each 163.84 μs time bin, we compute the ACF (equation (1)) across frequency (ACF is computed for spectra with a frequency resolution of 24 kHz), and measure the modulation index as the height of the Lorentzian fit to the ACF around zero lag. We only plot modulation indices for 163.84 μs time bins that have a S/N > 8 (a). The mean of the measured time resolved modulation indices for the 128 kHz scintillation scale is shown with the red line in a, and is measured to be \(\bar{m}=0.76\pm 0.06\), consistent with the frequency-resolved modulation index measured for this scintillation scale.

Extended Data Fig. 2 On-burst and off-burst spectra across the CHIME observing band from 400–800 MHz (panels a,c,e).

A zoom-in around 472–477 MHz (the yellow bar in a,c,e) is plotted in b,d,f. Panels a and b are the spectra of the baseband data with frequency resolution 0.39 MHz (1024 channels across the entire observing band). The upchannelized spectra (frequency resolution: 0.76 kHz) are shown in c and d before correcting for the scalloping introduced by the FFT. The model we use to correct the scalloping is shown in purple in d. Panels e and f show the spectra after correcting for the upchannelization scalloping, and applying additional RFI masking.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Decorrelation bandwidth and corresponding frequency dependence measured from 100 simulated FRB spectra using the same input parameters, and utilising the same RFI mask and subband edges as used in the analysis of FRB 20221022A.

a, Measured decorrelation bandwidths in the simulations. The black line is the decorrelation bandwidth measurement of a simulated spectrum using the same input parameters but without RFI masking and using equal frequency width subbands. Similarly, b shows the measured decorrelation bandwidth frequency indices, comparing again with the measurement from a simulated spectrum without RFI masking and using equal width subbands (black line).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Diagram of a two-screen lensing setup.

The relevant distances, d, length scales, L, and angular broadening angles, θ are shown relating the source (⋆), screen nearest the source (s2), screen nearest the observer (s1) and observer.

Extended Data Fig. 5 The lateral emission region size as it depends on the Galactic screen distance, d⊕s1, through the relationship shown on Fig. 3 and the two-screen constraint in equation (9).

The green shaded region shows the allowable lateral emission region sizes and Galactic screen distance combinations for our measured scintillation parameters at 600 MHz: Δνs2 = 128 kHz and ms2 = 0.78. The black vertical line indicates the NE2001 prediction23: d⊕s1 = 0.64 kpc. The orange shaded region shows the emission region sizes estimated for non-magnetospheric models5,6,7,8. The grey hatched region shows the parameter space we ruled out based on the apparent diameter of the host galaxy (see Fig. 3).

Extended Data Fig. 6 Lateral emission region size constraints for the other cases we consider.

Case (2) in the text refers to the extragalactic screen having a decorrelation bandwidth of 128 kHz at 600 MHz and a modulation index of 1 (green shaded region); and case (3) for the extragalactic screen having a decorrelation bandwidth of 6 kHz at 600 MHz and a modulation index of 1 (blue shaded region). Panel a is the same as Fig. 3 (case (1)) for different scintillation measurements (case (2) and case (3)), and panel b is the same as Extended Data Fig. 5 for the additional cases considered.

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Nimmo, K., Pleunis, Z., Beniamini, P. et al. Magnetospheric origin of a fast radio burst constrained using scintillation. Nature 637, 48–51 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08297-w

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