Precessing flaring magnetar as a source of repeating FRB 180916.J0158+65
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment detected periodicity in the bursting rate of the repeating FRB 180916.J0158+65. In a popular class of models, the fast radio bursts (FRBs) are created by magnetic flares of a hyperactive magnetar driven by fast ambipolar diffusion in the core. We point out that in this scenario the magnetar is expected to precess freely with a period of weeks to months. The internal magnetic field B ~ 10<sup>16</sup> G deforms the star, and magnetic flares induce sudden changes in magnetic stresses. The resulting torques and displacements of the principal axes of inertia are capable of pumping a significant amplitude of precession. The anisotropy of the flaring FRB activity, combined with precession, implies a strong periodic modulation of the visible bursting rate. The ultrastrong field invoked in the magnetar model provides: (1) energy for the frequent giant flares, (2) the high rate of ambipolar diffusion, releasing the magnetic energy on the timescale ~10<sup>9</sup> s, (3) the core temperature T ≈ 10<sup>9</sup> K, likely above the critical temperature for neutron superfluidity, (4) strong magnetospheric torques, which efficiently spin down the star, and (5) deformation with ellipticity ∊ ≳ 10−<sup>6</sup>, much greater than the rotational deformation. These conditions result in a precession with negligible viscous damping, and can explain the observed 16 day period in FRB 180916.J0158+65. The increase of precession period due to the magnetar spindown should become measurable in the near future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".