Quark-Novae in the outskirts of galaxies: An explanation of the Fast Radio Burst phenomenon

Understand

We show that old isolated neutron stars in groups and clusters of galaxies experiencing a Quark-Nova phase (QN: an explosive transition to a quark star) may be the source of FRBs.

• Each of the millions of fragments of the ultra-relativistic QN ejecta provides a collisionless plasma for which the ambient medium (galactic/halo, the intra-group/intra-cluster medium) acts as a relativistic plasma beam.
• The Buneman and the Weibel instabilities, successively induced by the beam in the fragment, generate particle bunching and observed coherent emission at GHz frequency with a corresponding fluence in the Jy ms range.
• The duration, frequency drift and the rate are in agreement with observed properties of FRBs.