The Detection of an Extremely Bright Fast Radio Burst in a Phased Array Feed Survey

Abstract

We report the detection of an ultra-bright fast radio burst (FRB) from a modest, 3.4-day pilot survey with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder. The survey was conducted in a wide-field fly’s-eye configuration using the phased-array-feed technology deployed on the array to instantaneously observe an effective area of 160 deg 2 , and achieve an exposure totaling 13200 deg 2 hr . We constrain the position of FRB 170107 to a region in size (90% containment) and its fluence to be 58 ± 6 Jy ms. The spectrum of the burst shows a sharp cutoff above 1400 MHz, which could be due to either scintillation or an intrinsic feature of the burst. This confirms the existence of an ultra-bright ( Jy ms) population of FRBs.