Parkes observations for project P1150 semester 2022APRS_04

Brief description

To date, the only radio pulsars that have been confirmed outside of our Galaxy lie in the Magellanic Clouds, with the LMC being the richer of the two galaxies in terms of pulsar discoveries. However, no millisecond pulsars (MSPs) have yet been discovered in the LMC or anywhere outside of our Galaxy. Since the majority of MSPs reside in binary systems, the discovery and study of MSPs can help us understand LMC binary pulsar evolution and MSP companion characteristics, as well as the different star formation environment of the LMC. We have discovered a number of weak but promising MSP candidates in a survey of the LMC in a high-resolution multibeam survey. Although these candidates have characteristics that suggest they are real, the detections from the survey data are too weak by themselves to definitively state whether they are real or not. Follow-up confirmations are thus required, and the UWL receiver makes such confirmations feasible. We estimate that with the increased sensitivity of the UWL compared to the multibeam system, we can obtain clear confirmation detections with S/N > 10-12 with one-hour integrations per candidate. We propose to confirm 10 of our MSP candidates from the survey with one-hour observations with the UWL system, which totals 10 hr of time requested (plus overhead time for setup, and slew). If these candidates are confirmed, these would be the first extragalactic radio MSPs ever discovered.