An Image-based Blind Search for Fast Radio Bursts in 88 hr of Data from the EoR0 Field, with the Murchison Widefield Array

This work is part of ongoing efforts to detect fast radio bursts using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in a spectral window below 300 MHz. We used an image-based method based on the pilot study of Tingay et al., scaled up via massively parallel processing using a commercial supercomputer. We searched 87.6 hr of 2 s snapshot images, each covering 1165 square degrees of the EoR0 field, over a dispersion measure range of 170–1035 pc cm −3 . The large amount of data necessitated the construction of a series of filters to classify and reject the large number of false positives. Our search was more sensitive than any previous blind search using the MWA telescope, but we report no fast radio bursts detections, a result which is consistent with the extrapolation into the low-frequency domain of the results of M. Sokolowski et al. We obtain upper bounds on the event rate ranging from