Parkes observations for project P1211 semester 2023OCTS_04

Full description

Traditional pulsar searching techniques are not sensitive enough to extreme pulsars such as millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in compact binaries (e.g., Pulsar-Blackhole binary systems), extremely fast spinning pulsars (e.g., sub-MSPs), and high dispersion measure (DM) pulsars (e.g., pulsars in Galactic Centre and Galactic Plane). Such a situation is now changed thanks to the development of next generation radio telescope arrays such as Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). ASKAP is capable of conducting highly sensitive radio continuum surveys with wide sky coverage (e.g, Evolutionary Map of The Universe survey). One of the solutions is to find pulsar candidates in radio continuum surveys such as EMU and then carry out targeted searches. This technique allows us to search over the wide bandwidth with full field of view while avoiding the need for expensive pixel-by-pixel high time resolution searches.

In this proposal, we propose to observe 16 MSP candidates identified in the Galactic plane using new ASKAP EMU images. We found 23 candidates by selecting sources with spectral index steeper than -1.90 and compactness less than 1.2. Among them 7 are known pulsars giving us high fraction of pulsars (~33%) and a reasonable number of candidates to follow up (16 sources). Because of the dense ionised medium in the Galactic Plane, MSPs are likely to be missed by previous pulsar surveys carried out at 1.4 GHz. Here, we propose a targeted pulsar search with the Parkes UWL which allow us to search pulsation at higher frequencies and therefore avoid strong DM smearing and scattering effects.