Following up on
my note from a month ago, Edo Berger
and I have obtained follow-up data and written a paper on the claimed host
association of FRB 150418. That paper is now in press in ApJ Letters, and
a preprint is available on arxiv.org. Our
data show that the claimed host galaxy is indeed a highly variable radio
source, which in the context of the data shown in
the Keane et al. paper means that
there is no particular reason to think that the FRB originated there. We’re
grateful to the NRAO and the Astrophysical Journal for making it possible to
turn this project around so quickly!
Update (2016 Apr 13): I’ve updated the plot with the final observations of
our program.
Radio light curve of the candidate host galaxy for FRB 150418. The initial observations were interpreted as a radio transient, but our follow-up data show that the galaxy itself is variable.
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