It's raining bursts

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© ASTRON/Futselaar/Hessels/Nimmo

FRB 20200120E is a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) source discovered by CHIME/FRB and precisely localised by our AstroFlash team using the European VLBI Network. Surprisingly, this FRB was found in a globular cluster, a dense conglomeration of old stars. How is this possible if it is a young and energetic source? One possibility is that it's a young neutron star formed by the merger of two compact stars, or the collapse of a white dwarf that has accreted too much matter from a companion star.

To better understand this puzzling FRB, we have been monitoring it with the 100-m Effelsberg telescope. In a recently accepted paper in MNRAS (Nimmo et al. 2023; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.03759.pdf ), we detected the first-known burst "storm" from this source. Within minutes, the source went from being quiet to producing 50 bursts. Those bursts, and more, are shown here - on top of an artist's conception of what the source might look like.

What triggered this rare storm? Was it magnetic reconfiguration in the highly twisted field of a magnetar, or something else? In Nimmo et al. (2023), we compare and contrast FRB 20200120E with other repeating FRBs, finding that it both shows clear differences and similarities. Ongoing polarimetric analysis of the data will be the next step in understanding this source.