Issue |
A&A
Volume 645, January 2021
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A122 | |
Number of page(s) | 20 | |
Section | Astrophysical processes | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202038975 | |
Published online | 22 January 2021 |
Fast radio burst repeaters produced via Kozai-Lidov feeding of neutron stars in binary systems
1
Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7095, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, 98bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France
e-mail: decoene@iap.fr
2
Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
3
Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK
Received:
20
July
2020
Accepted:
26
November
2020
Neutron stars are likely surrounded by gas, debris, and asteroid belts. Kozai-Lidov perturbations, induced by a distant, but gravitationally bound companion, can trigger the infall of such orbiting bodies onto a central compact object. These effects could lead to the emission of fast radio bursts (FRBs), for example by asteroid-induced magnetic wake fields in the wind of the compact object. A few percent of binary neutron star systems in the Universe, such as neutron star-main sequence star, neutron star-white dwarf, double neutron star, and neutron star-black hole systems, can account for the observed non-repeating FRB rates. More remarkably, we find that wide and close companion orbits lead to non-repeating and repeating sources, respectively, and they allow for one to compute a ratio between repeating and non-repeating sources of a few percent, which is in close agreement with the observations. Three major predictions can be made from our scenario, which can be tested in the coming years: (1) most repeaters should stop repeating after a period between 10 years to a few decades, as their asteroid belts become depleted; (2) some non-repeaters could occasionally repeat, if we hit the short period tail of the FRB period distribution; and (3) series of sub-Jansky level short radio bursts could be observed as electromagnetic counterparts of the mergers of binary neutron star systems.
Key words: stars: neutron / binaries: general / radiation: dynamics / radiation mechanisms: non-thermal / turbulence / submillimeter: general
© V. Decoene et al. 2021
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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