Landing page for project EM161

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) remain as enigmatic sources of unknown origin. These events are millisecond-long radio flashes located at cosmological distances. While hundreds have been discovered, only a handful of them have been precisely localized to date. Until now, only one FRB, 121102, had a persistent radio source associated with the bursts. Recently, a second FRB of similar properties has been discovered, FRB 190520. The bursts have only been localized to the arcsec level by the VLA, and they appear to be consistent with the position of a compact (on VLBI scales) and persistent radio source. We request EVN observations to localize the bursts from FRB 190520 to milliarcsecond precision, which would allow us to constrain the possible projected separation between the bursts and the persistent source on ~20 pc scales. The study of their location, together with the size constraints on the persistent source would allow us to compare this FRB with the previously known one. These results would unveil if FRBs with persistent emission may be related to very young sources, and clarify if the persistent emission arises from a possible superluminous supernova or a massive black hole.

This data is part of the archive of VLBI data maintained by JIVE on behalf of the EVN, a network of radio telescopes located primarily in Europe and Asia, with additional antennas in South Africa. The EVN archive itself has the DOI https://doi.org/10.17616/R3Z197