A model of neutron-star--white-dwarf collision for fast radio bursts

Understand

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) with unknown origin emit a huge luminosity (about 1 Jy at 1 GHz) with a duration of milliseconds or less at extragalactic distances estimated from their large dispersion measure (DM).

• We propose herein a scenario for a collision between a neutron star (NS) and a white dwarf (WD) as the progenitor of the FRBs by considering the burst duration scaling to the collision time and the radio luminosity proportional to the kinetic energy of the collision.
• The relations among the observed flux density, pulse width, and the DM are derived from the model and compared with the statistical results from the observed FRBs.
• Although the sample is quite small, we tentatively report a nearly inverse-square correlation between the observed peak flux density and the DM excess, which is an consequence of the assumption that the DM excess (i.e.