| 26th of May 2020 |
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| An in-depth investigation of 11 pulsars discovered by FAST |
| by Andrew Cameron |
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Completed in 2016, the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio
Telescope (FAST) in southern China is the world’s largest and
most-sensitive single-dish radio telescope. Since late 2017,
scientists in both Australia and Germany have been working together
with those from FAST to study the dozens of new radio pulsars FAST has
detected as part of its early science operations. Recently,
Cameron et al.. published the first major science results from
this international project, documenting the properties of 11 new
pulsars which were studied with the Parkes radio telescope after their
discovery by FAST.
The image above shows the profiles of six of these new pulsars, sandwiched between the 500-m FAST (left) and 64-m Parkes (right) radio telescopes. Each profile is constructed by summing at least several thousand individual pulses to give a high signal-to-noise average pulse shape. The total flux density (in millijanskys) is given by the black curve, while the red and blue curves show the linearly and circularly polarised components of the profile respectively. The large-dashed vertical lines on each profile show the profile width at 10% of the peak intensity, while the small-dashed vertical lines show the width at 50%. Finally, the polarisation angle (PA) of the linearly-polarised flux is shown in the sub-plot above each profile, with well-defined PA trends visible for PSR J0344-0901, J0803-0942 and J1900-0134. |