Abstract
Neutron stars are likely surrounded by gas, debris, and asteroid belts. Kozai-Lidov perturbations, induced by a distant, but gravitationally bound companion, can trigger the infall of such orbiting bodies onto a central compact object. These effects could lead to the emission of fast radio bursts (FRBs), for example by asteroid-induced magnetic wake fields in the wind of the compact object. A few percent of binary neutron star systems in the Universe, such as neutron star-main sequence star, neutron star-white dwarf, double neutron star, and neutron star-black hole systems, can account for the observed non-repeating FRB rates. More remarkably, we find that wide and close companion orbits lead to non-repeating and repeating sources, respectively, and they allow for one to compute a ratio between repeating and non-repeating sources of a few percent, which is in close agreement with the observations. Three major predictions can be made from our scenario, which can be tested in the coming years: (1) most repeaters should stop repeating after a period between 10 years to a few decades, as their asteroid belts become depleted; (2) some non-repeaters could occasionally repeat, if we hit the short period tail of the FRB period distribution; and (3) series of sub-Jansky level short radio bursts could be observed as electromagnetic counterparts of the mergers of binary neutron star systems.
Highlights
The origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs), these brief, coherent, and numerous radio pulses, has not been identified yet
We focus here on neutron star-white dwarf (NSWD), neutron star-main sequence star (NSMS), neutron star-neutron star (DNS) and neutron star-black hole (NSBH) binaries, which are found to be common outcomes of the evolution of binary systems containing neutron stars (Portegies Zwart & Verbunt 1996; Nelemans et al 2001)
Fast radio bursts can be produced if asteroids pass close to the Roche limit of a compact object with an electromagnetic wind (Mottez & Zarka 2014; Mottez et al 2020), or if they undergo collisions with this object (Dai 2016; Smallwood et al 2019)
Summary
The origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs), these brief, coherent, and numerous radio pulses, has not been identified yet. The key observables at this stage, besides the energy budget and time variability, are the rates of bursts and of repeating events These numbers are challenging to reconcile with the existing source models in the literature. This study is strongly related to the one presented in Mottez et al (2020), where the authors discuss the possible FRB emission from the interaction between an asteroid belt and a pulsar This is why we often refer to their work regarding the radio emission mechanism. Our work focuses on the orbital dynamic of the asteroids inside the belt In this perspective, we first present the FRB emission model and the parameter sets required for the signal to be observed.
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