The detection of an extremely bright fast radio burst in a phased array feed survey

Understand

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 $8'\times8'$ in size (90% containment) and its fluence to be $58\pm6$ Jy ms.
• The spectrum of the burst shows a sharp cutoff above $1400$ MHz, which could be either due to scintillation or an intrinsic feature of the burst.