Discovery and follow-up of rotating radio transients with the Green Bank and LOFAR telescopes
- Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, QC H3A 2T8 (Canada)
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory, P.O. Box 2, Green Bank, WV 24944 (United States)
- ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Postbus 2, 7990 AA Dwingeloo (Netherlands)
- Department of Physics, West Virginia University, 111 White Hall, Morgantown, WV 26506 (United States)
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101 (United States)
- Center for Advanced Radio Astronomy and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Texas at Brownsville, Brownsville, TX 78520 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211 (United States)
- Eureka Scientific Inc., 2452 Delmer Street, Suite 100, Oakland, CA 94602 (United States)
We have discovered 21 Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) in data from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) 350 MHz Drift-scan and the Green Bank North Celestial Cap pulsar surveys using a new candidate sifting algorithm. RRATs are pulsars with sporadic emission that are detected through their bright single pulses rather than Fourier domain searches. We have developed RRATtrap, a single-pulse sifting algorithm that can be integrated into pulsar survey data analysis pipelines in order to find RRATs and Fast Radio Bursts. We have conducted follow-up observations of our newly discovered sources at several radio frequencies using the GBT and Low Frequency Array, yielding improved positions and measurements of their periods, dispersion measures (DMs), and burst rates, as well as phase-coherent timing solutions for four of them. The new RRATs have DMs ranging from 15 to 97 pc cm{sup −3}, periods of 240 ms to 3.4 s, and estimated burst rates of 20 to 400 pulses hr{sup −1} at 350 MHz. We use this new sample of RRATs to perform statistical comparisons between RRATs and canonical pulsars in order to shed light on the relationship between the two populations. We find that the DM and spatial distributions of the RRATs agree with those of the pulsars found in the same survey. We find evidence that slower pulsars (i.e., P>200 ms) are preferentially more likely to emit bright single pulses than are faster pulsars (P<200 ms), although this conclusion is tentative. Our results are consistent with the proposed link between RRATs, transient pulsars, and canonical pulsars as sources in various parts of the pulse activity spectrum.
- OSTI ID:
- 22882793
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 809; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Language:
- English
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