Fast Radio Burst Host Residuals

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have tracked down two brief, powerful radio bursts to the spiral arms of the two galaxies shown at top and bottom of this image. The catalogue names of the bursts are FRB 190714, top row, and FRB 180924, bottom row.

The galaxies are far from Earth, appearing as they looked billions of years ago. The dotted oval lines in each of the four images mark the location of the brilliant radio flares. The two images at left show the full Hubble snapshots of each galaxy.

To study each galaxy’s spiral structure in more detail, the researchers overlaid a computer model of the galaxies' starlight onto the images at left. They then subtracted the smoother, more diffuse starlight from each of those images. The resulting two images at right reveal each galaxy's spiral arms more clearly, which were harder to see in the original images.

Because these radio pulses disappear in much less than the blink of an eye, researchers have had a hard time tracking down where they come from.

These galaxies are part of a survey to determine the origin of fast radio bursts, which can release as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the Sun does in a year.

Identifying the radio bursts' location helped researchers narrow the list of possible FRB sources that can generate such prodigious tsunamis of energy. One of the leading possible explanations is a torrential blast from a young magnetar. Magnetars are a type of neutron star with extraordinarily powerful magnetic fields.

The observations were made in ultraviolet and near-infrared light with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The images were taken between November 2019 and April 2020.

Credits

Science

NASA, ESA, Alexandra Mannings (UC Santa Cruz), Wen-fai Fong (Northwestern)

Image Processing

Alyssa Pagan (STScI)