Oral Presentation
Searching for fast radio bursts from globular clusters in M49 using FAST
Presenter: Simon Ho (Australian National University/Swinburne University of Technology)
The origins of FRBs are presently unknown, although magnetars are a leading progenitor candidate. Magnetars originate in core-collapse supernova events in young stellar populations, so the discovery of an FRB (FRB20200120E) from a globular cluster (GC) in the nearby disk galaxy M81 came as a surprise since GCs are an ancient population. To further investigate GC-associated FRBs, expanding the sample of localised FRBs in nearby galaxies is essential. M49 (also known as NGC 4472) is a nearby, radio-quiet giant elliptical galaxy with ~7000 GCs, making it an ideal candidate for GC FRB searches. We conducted a 9-hour SnapShot observation on M49 with the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) 19-beam receiver covering about 2500 GCs. We performed a preliminary search for FRB-like signals in the first 3 hours of the observation. We did not detect any high S/N FRB-like signals, and our single pulse search flux density limit is 30 mJy at 1.25 GHz. However, we detected some interesting low S/N single pulse candidates where the most promising one with an S/N of 10.1, 1 ms duration and a dispersion measure (DM) ~ 412 pc/cm^3. Further analyses will be performed to check whether they are true detections and further search for the remaining 6 hours of the observation.
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