Wideband Monitoring of FRB 20180916B across a Half Decade of Bandwidth Using the Upgraded GMRT

Abstract With the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) having unprecedented sensitivity and unique capability of providing instantaneous frequency coverage of 250−1460 MHz, we studied FRB 20180916B with 4 month sampling during its active phase. We report the detection of 74 bursts at Band 3 (i.e., 250−500 MHz) and four bursts at Band 4 (i.e., 550−750 MHz) of the uGMRT, providing a burst rate of ∼4 bursts hr −1 above a fluence of 0.05 Jy ms. We find that the source emits maximum energy and luminosity up to a fractional bandwidth of 70 MHz near the middle of its activity window consistent with earlier studies. We see a strong correlation between the excess dispersion measure and excess scattering width. We find that the normalized cumulative distribution of the waiting time can be well fitted by an exponential function, indicating a stochastic emission process. We also notice that the cumulative burst rate changes rapidly with the intrinsic energy of the bursts near the middle of the activity window, considering the full observed window of 0.4–0.6 of this fast radio burst, where this change is much steeper for high-energy bursts and shallower for low-energy bursts.