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A Fast Radio Burst Occurs Every Second throughout the Observable Universe

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Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Fialkov, A 
Loeb, A 

Abstract

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Recent multi-telescope observations of the repeating fast radio burst (FRB) FRB 121102 reveal a Gaussian-like spectral profile and associate the event with a dwarf metal-poor galaxy at a cosmological redshift of 0.19. Assuming that this event represents the entire FRB population, we make predictions for the expected number counts of FRBs observable by future radio telescopes between 50 MHz and 3.5 GHz. We vary our model assumptions to bracket the expected rate of FRBs and find that it exceeds one FRB per second per sky when accounting for faint sources. We show that future low-frequency radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array, could detect more than one FRB per minute over the entire sky originating from the epoch of reionization.

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Keywords

cosmology: theory

Journal Title

Astrophysical Journal Letters

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2041-8205
2041-8213

Volume Title

846

Publisher

American Astronomical Society

Rights

All rights reserved