Identifying pulsar candidates in interferometric radio images using scintillation

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Hauptverfasser: Salal, Jitendra, Tendulkar, Shriharsh P., Marthi, Visweshwar Ram
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Salal, Jitendra
Tendulkar, Shriharsh P.
Marthi, Visweshwar Ram
author_facet Salal, Jitendra
Tendulkar, Shriharsh P.
Marthi, Visweshwar Ram
contents Pulsars have been primarily detected by their narrow pulses or periodicity in time domain data. Interferometric surveys for pulsars are challenging due to the trade-off between beam sensitivity and beam size and the corresponding tradeoff between survey sensitivity (depth), sky coverage, and computational efforts. The detection sensitivity of time-domain searches for pulsars is affected by dispersion smearing, scattering, and rapid orbital motion of pulsars in binaries. We have developed a new technique to select pulsar candidates in interferometric radio images by identifying scintillating sources and measuring their scintillation bandwidth and timescale. Identifying likely candidates allows sensitive, focused time-domain searches, saving computational effort. Pulsar scintillation is independent of its timing properties and hence offers a different selection of pulsars compared to time-domain searches. Candidates identified from this method could allow us to find hard-to-detect pulsars, such as sub-millisecond pulsars and pulsars in very compact, highly-accelerated binary orbits. We use uGMRT observations in the fields of PSR\,B1508+55, PSR\,J0437$-$4715, and PSR\,B0031$-$07 as test cases for our technique. We demonstrate that the technique correctly differentiates between the pulsar and other non-scintillating point sources and show that the extracted dynamic spectrum of the pulsar is equivalent to that extracted from the uGMRT phased array beam. We show the results from our analysis of known pulsar fields and discuss challenges in dealing with interference and instrumental effects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_17764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying pulsar candidates in interferometric radio images using scintillation
Salal, Jitendra
Tendulkar, Shriharsh P.
Marthi, Visweshwar Ram
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Pulsars have been primarily detected by their narrow pulses or periodicity in time domain data. Interferometric surveys for pulsars are challenging due to the trade-off between beam sensitivity and beam size and the corresponding tradeoff between survey sensitivity (depth), sky coverage, and computational efforts. The detection sensitivity of time-domain searches for pulsars is affected by dispersion smearing, scattering, and rapid orbital motion of pulsars in binaries. We have developed a new technique to select pulsar candidates in interferometric radio images by identifying scintillating sources and measuring their scintillation bandwidth and timescale. Identifying likely candidates allows sensitive, focused time-domain searches, saving computational effort. Pulsar scintillation is independent of its timing properties and hence offers a different selection of pulsars compared to time-domain searches. Candidates identified from this method could allow us to find hard-to-detect pulsars, such as sub-millisecond pulsars and pulsars in very compact, highly-accelerated binary orbits. We use uGMRT observations in the fields of PSR\,B1508+55, PSR\,J0437$-$4715, and PSR\,B0031$-$07 as test cases for our technique. We demonstrate that the technique correctly differentiates between the pulsar and other non-scintillating point sources and show that the extracted dynamic spectrum of the pulsar is equivalent to that extracted from the uGMRT phased array beam. We show the results from our analysis of known pulsar fields and discuss challenges in dealing with interference and instrumental effects.
title Identifying pulsar candidates in interferometric radio images using scintillation
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17764