Improving Recent Large-Scale Pulsar Surveys

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

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Scientific paper

Pulsars are unique in that they act as celestial laboratories for precise tests of gravity and other extreme physics (Kramer 2004). There are approximately 2000 known pulsars today, which is less than ten percent of pulsars in the Milky Way according to theoretical models (Lorimer 2004). Out of these 2000 known pulsars, approximately ten percent are known millisecond pulsars, objects used for their period stability for detailed physics tests and searches for gravitational radiation (Lorimer 2008). As the field and instrumentation progress, pulsar astronomers attempt to overcome observational biases and detect new pulsars, consequently discovering new millisecond pulsars. We attempt to improve large scale pulsar surveys by examining three recent pulsar surveys. The first, the Green Bank Telescope 350MHz Drift Scan, a low frequency isotropic survey of the northern sky, has yielded a large number of candidates that were visually inspected and identified, resulting in over 34.000 thousands candidates viewed, dozens of detections of known pulsars, and the discovery of a new low-flux pulsar, PSRJ1911+22. The second, the PALFA survey, is a high frequency survey of the galactic plane with the Arecibo telescope. We created a processing pipeline for the PALFA survey at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville- VA, in addition to making needed modifications upon advice from the PALFA consortium. The third survey examined is a new GBT 820MHz survey devoted to find new millisecond pulsars by observing the target-rich environment of unidentified sources in the FERMI LAT catalogue. By approaching these three pulsar surveys at different stages, we seek to improve the success rates of large scale surveys, and hence the possibility for ground-breaking work in both basic physics and astrophysics.

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