27–29 Aug 2025
Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC)
Australia/Perth timezone

Imaging pulsar census of the Galactic Plane using MWA VCS data

27 Aug 2025, 13:50
20m
Auditorium (Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC))

Auditorium

Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC)

26 Dick Perry Ave, Kensington WA 6151
Presentation Galactic and Extragalactic (GEG)

Speaker

Susmita Sett

Description

Traditional pulsar surveys have primarily employed time-domain periodicity searches. However, these methods are susceptible to effects like scattering, eclipses and orbital motion. At lower radio frequencies ($\lesssim$ 300\,MHz), factors such as dispersion measure and pulse broadening become more prominent, reducing the detection sensitivity. On the other hand, image domain searches for pulsars are not limited by these effects and can extend the parameter space to regions inaccessible to traditional search techniques. Therefore, we have developed a pipeline to form 1-second full Stokes images from offline correlated high time-resolution data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). This led to the development of image-based methodologies to identify new pulsar candidates. This talk focuses on the detection of the known pulsar population which were present in the Galactic Plane region of the sky observed using both image-based and beamformed methods. This resulted in the detection of 83 known pulsars, with 16 pulsars found only in Stokes I images but not in periodicity searches applied in beamformed data. Notably, for 14 pulsars these are the first reported low-frequency detections. This underscores the importance of image-based searches for pulsars that may be undetectable in time-series data, due to scattering and/or dispersive smearing at low frequencies. This highlights the importance of low-frequency flux density measurements in refining pulsar spectral models and investigating the spectral turnover of pulsars at low frequencies.

Timeslot preferences 20min

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