SGR 1935+2154 is a soft gamma repeater that is an ancient stellar remnant. Currently, the phenomena and the related anomalous X-ray pulsars are explained as arising from magnetars. On 28 April 2020, this remnant in the local galaxy about 30,000 ly away, in Vulpecula, was observed to be associated with a very powerful radio pulse and a related very bright x-ray counterpart. The detection is notable as the first FRB detected inside the Milky Way and the first to be linked to a known source.
History
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope first alerted the astronomical community to an increase in activity from the remnant with the detection of a flare on 27 April 2020. The next day, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment first reported the detection of two bright radio bursts from 400 MHz to 800 MHz in the direction of the remnant, establishing the link between radio emission and the remnant. They estimated that the bursts had an energy similar to the brightest giant pulses from the Crab pulsar, which had never been seen from a magnetar. An independent detection of the bursts at 1.4 GHz by the STARE2 team established that the burst, now named FRB 200428, is similar to the fast radio bursts at extragalactic distances with their report that the fluence of the burst must be >1.5 MJy ms, more than a thousand times that reported by CHIME. At the distance of the closest known fast radio burst, FRB 200428 would have been detected with a fluence of >7 mJy ms. The INTEGRAL, Konus-Wind, Insight-HXMT, and AGILE telescopes then reported the detection of an X-ray burst from SGR 1935+2154 that occurred at the same time as the CHIME and STARE2 bursts, marking the first time an FRB had been associated with an X-ray source. To further secure the association of FRB 200428 with the remnant, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope reported the detection of a much weaker radio burst, which was localized to within a maximal of a few arcminutes of the position of the remnant with a dispersion measure consistent with those reported by STARE2 and CHIME. The NuSTAR, Swift, and NICER satellites observed several short X-ray bursts from the remnant on 29 April 2020 and 30 April 2020, confirming the magnetar was still in an active phase. The Very Large Array followed the remnant 1–2 days after FRB 200428 and did not find any pulsed radio emission or an afterglow. The Deep Space Network observed the remnant 1.5 to 3.5 days after the FRB and did not find evidence of periodic emission. LOFAR searched for other pulses from the remnant 1.5 days after FRB 200428 at 145 MHz and did not find any. Arecibo did not detect any bursts during a period of activity from the remnant in October 2019. Spektr-RG observed the remnant four days prior to FRB 200428 and found no evidence of flaring activity. Followup studies and observations have been reported. On 4 June 2020, astronmers reported "periodic radio pulsations" from the remnant with the Medicina Northern Crossradio observatory on 30 May 2020. Another study was reported on 6 June 2020 of observations made earlier with the European VLBI Network on 13 May 2020. There have been other reported observations as well.
