The magnetar model's energy crisis for a prolific repeating fast radio burst source
Jun-Shuo Zhang, Tian-Cong Wang, Pei Wang, Qin Wu, Di Li, Weiwei Zhu, Bing Zhang, He Gao, Ke-Jia Lee, Jinlin Han, Chao-Wei Tsai, Fayin Wang, Yong-Feng Huang, Yuan-Chuan Zou, Dengke Zhou, Wanjin Lu, Jintao Xie, Jianhua Fang, Jinhuang Cao, Chen-Chen Miao, Yuhao Zhu, Yunchuan Chen, Xiaofeng Cheng, Yinan Ke, Yong-Kun Zhang, Long-Xuan Zhang, Shuo Cao, Shiyan Tian, Zi-Wei Wu, Chunfeng Zhang, Jiarui Niu, Dejiang Zhou, Silu Xu, Bojun Wang, Huaxi Chen, Xiang-Lei Chen, Xianghan Cui, Yi Feng, Erbil Gügercinoğlu, Yu-Xiang Huang, Dongming Li, Dong-Zi Li, Ye Li, Lin Lin, Xiaohui Liu, Rui Luo, Jia-Wei Luo, Chen-Hui Niu, Qingyue Qu, Yuanhong Qu, Habtamu Menberu Tedila, Chengjie Wang, Wei-Yang Wang, Yabiao Wang, Yi-Dan Wang, Suming Weng, Yunsheng Wu, Heng Xu, Aiyuan Yang, Yuan-Pei Yang, Shihan Yew, Wenfei Yu, Lei Zhang, Rushuang Zhao
Published: 2025/7/19
Abstract
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are widely considered to originate from magnetars that power the explosion through releasing magnetic energy. Active repeating FRBs have been seen to produce hundreds of bursts per hour and can stay active for months, thus may provide stringent constraints on the energy budget of FRBs' central engine. Within a time span of 214 days, we detected 11,553 bursts from the hyper-active FRB 20240114A that reached a peak burst rate of 729 hr$^{-1}$. This is the largest burst sample from any single FRB source, exceeding the cumulative total of all published bursts from all known FRBs to date. Assuming typical values of radio efficiency and beaming factor, the estimated total isotropic burst energy of this source exceeds 86% of the dipolar magnetic energy of a typical magnetar. The total released energy from this source exceeds that of other known repeaters by about one and a half orders of magnitude, yielding the most stringent lower limit of $4.7\times10^{32}$ G cm$^3$ for the magnetar's magnetic moment. The source remained active at the end of this observation campaign. Our findings thus require either the FRB's central magnetar engine's possessing exceptionally high emission efficiency or a more powerful compact object than a typical magnetar.