4.3 Article

The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: I. Project design and pulsar discoveries

Journal

RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Volume 21, Issue 5, Pages -

Publisher

NATL ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORIES, CHIN ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1088/1674-4527/21/5/107

Keywords

pulsars; general

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [11988101, 11833009, U1731120, U1831103, 11873058, U2031115]
  2. Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [QYZDJ-SSW-SLH021]
  3. National SKA program of China [2020SKA0120200, 2020SKA0120100]
  4. Xiaofeng Yang's Xinjiang Tianchi Bairen project
  5. CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program
  6. Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS

Ask authors/readers for more resources

The GPPS survey, utilizing the sensitive FAST radio telescope, aims to discover pulsars within the Galactic plane with a focus on inner Galaxy regions. The survey has successfully discovered 201 pulsars, including faint ones undetectable by other telescopes and those challenging current models for Galactic electron density distribution.
Discovery of pulsars is one of the main goals for large radio telescopes. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), that incorporates an L-band 19-beam receiver with a system temperature of about 20 K, is the most sensitive radio telescope utilized for discovering pulsars. We designed the snapshot observation mode for a FAST key science project, the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey, in which every four nearby pointings can observe a cover of a sky patch of 0.1575 square degrees through beam-switching of the L-band 19-beam receiver. The integration time for each pointing is 300 seconds so that the GPPS observations for a cover can be made in 21 minutes. The goal of the GPPS survey is to discover pulsars within the Galactic latitude of +/- 10 degrees from the Galactic plane, and the highest priority is given to the inner Galaxy within +/- 5 degrees. Up to now, the GPPS survey has discovered 201 pulsars, including currently the faintest pulsars which cannot be detected by other telescopes, pulsars with extremely high dispersion measures (DMs) which challenge the currently widely used models for the Galactic electron density distribution, pulsars coincident with supernova remnants, 40 millisecond pulsars, 16 binary pulsars, some nulling and mode-changing pulsars and rotating radio transients (RRATs). The follow-up observations for confirmation of new pulsars have polarization-signals recorded for polarization profiles of the pulsars. Re-detection of previously known pulsars in the survey data also leads to significant improvements in parameters for 64 pulsars. The GPPS survey discoveries are published and will be updated at http://zmtt.bao.ac.cn/GPPS/.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.3
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available