Fast radio burst repeaters produced via Kozai-Lidov feeding of neutron stars in binary systems

Vol. 635
2. Astrophysical processes

Fast radio burst repeaters produced via Kozai-Lidov feeding of neutron stars in binary systems

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long bright pulses of radio emission, and their large dispersion measures imply that they originate at cosmological distances. The infall of small bodies, such as comets or asteroids, onto a compact object is one possible scenario for their origin. A fraction of the FRBs are repeating, and in that scenario those need a mechanism that repeatedly sends small bodies onto the compact object. The authors propose that those repeaters originate in systems consisting of a central neutron star, small bodies orbiting nearby (e.g., an asteroid belt around the neutron star), and distant stellar companions on inclined orbits which perturb the small bodies toward large eccentricities through the Kozai-Lidov dynamical mechanism. The authors developed this model to make three major observational predictions which can be tested in the coming years.