Beijing (ANTARA) – Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), or “China’s Sky Eye”, Chinese scientists managed to detect 76 new weak and intermittent pulsars, including a group of the weakest pulsars currently known.
These pulsars are very special because they only pulse occasionally over many rotation periods, so they are known as rotating transient radio sources (RRAT), according to the study published Monday (2/10) in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Research That.
Unlike most pulsars that emit pulses continuously, RRAT is difficult to detect in ordinary pulsar search methods. These pulsars were identified through beat-by-beat analysis of large amounts of data collected by high-sensitivity radio telescopes.
Since RRATs were first detected in 2006, more than 160 RRATs have been detected by radio telescopes around the world. Detailed studies of several RRATs indicate that these phenomena are essentially pulsars but with special physical characteristics in the magnetosphere, which accounts for about 5 percent of the total number of pulsars.
A research team from the National Astronomical Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) developed a new efficient single-pulse search path and systematically searched for single pulses using data from the inception FAST Galactic Pulsar Snapshot Survey recorded since 2020.
Han Jinlin, a leading research scientist in this field from NAOC, said the 76 RRATs discovered with the new method account for about 12 percent of the total number of pulsars identified by the FAST survey. This indicates that there are more pulsars that emit occasional pulses than previously thought.
To further understand the physical characteristics of RRATs, scientists also used FAST to observe 59 known RRATs discovered by international telescopes. They found that none of the RRATs exhibited standard RRAT characteristics.
The polarization signals from the only occasionally emitted pulses detected by FAST indicate that they radiate in the same areas of the neutron star’s magnetosphere as normal pulses, according to the study.
“This study has important implications for understanding the numerous dead star remnants in the Milky Way galaxy and their radiation characteristics,” Han said, adding that high-sensitivity radio telescopes such as FAST are the best tools for detecting such interesting pulsars, according to Xinhua.
2023-10-03 06:02:04
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