JinLin Han (NAOC)

JinLin Han Colloquium: The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey

Online

Abstract

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), that incorporates an L-band 19-beam receiver with a system temperature of about 20 K, is the most sensitive radio telescope utilized for discovering pulsars. We designed the snapshot observation mode for a FAST key science project, the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey. The integration time for each pointing is 300 seconds so that the GPPS observations for a cover can be made in 21 minutes. The goal of the GPPS survey is to discover pulsars within the Galactic latitude of ±10deg from the Galactic plane, and the highest priority is given to the inner Galaxy within ±5deg.
Up to now, the GPPS survey has discovered 212 pulsars, including currently the faintest pulsars which cannot be detected by other telescopes, pulsars with extremely high dispersion measures (DMs) which challenge the currently widely used models for the Galactic electron density distribution, pulsars coincident with supernova remnants, 42 millisecond pulsars, 17 binary pulsars, some nulling and mode-changing pulsars and rotating radio transients (RRATs). The follow-up observations for confirmation of new pulsars have polarization-signals recorded for polarization profiles of the pulsars. Re-detection of previously known pulsars in the survey data also leads to significant improvements in parameters for 64 pulsars.
The GPPS survey discoveries are published and will be updated at http://zmtt.bao.ac.cn/GPPS/.