The Statistical Similarity of Repeating and Non-Repeating Fast Radio Bursts

TL;DR

This study compares the statistical properties of repeating and non-repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs), revealing differences in their distributions and suggesting they may have distinct origins and environments.

Contribution

The paper provides the first detailed statistical comparison of repeating and non-repeating FRBs, including their dispersion measures and luminosity distributions, indicating potential different origins.

Findings

$DM_E$ of FRBs follows a log-normal distribution.

Repeating and non-repeating FRBs have different $DM_E$ distributions.

Both types' luminosity distributions follow a broken power-law.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a sample of 21 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by different radio instruments before September 2021. Using the Anderson--Darling test, we compared the distributions of extra-Galactic dispersion measure ($DM_{\rm E}$) of non-repeating FRBs, repeating FRBs and all FRBs. It was found that the $ DM_{\rm E}$ values of three sub-samples are log-normally distributed. The $DM_{\rm E}$ of repeaters and non-repeaters were drawn from a different distribution on basis of the Mann--Whitney--Wilcoxon test. In addition, assuming that the non-repeating FRBs identified currently may be potentially repeators, i.e., the repeating FRBs to be universal and representative, one can utilize the averaged fluence of repeating FRBs as an indication from which to derive an apparent intensity distribution function (IDF) with a power-law index of $a_1=$ $1.10\pm 0.14$ ($a_2=$ $1.01\pm 0.16$, the observed fluence as a statistical variant), which is in good agreement with the previous IDF of 16 non-repeating FRBs found by Li et al. Based on the above statistics of repeating and non-repeating FRBs, we propose that both types of FRBs may have different cosmological origins, spatial distributions and circum-burst environments. Interestingly, the differential luminosity distributions of repeating and non-repeating FRBs can also be well described by a broken power-law function with the same power-law index of $-$1.4.