Journal article
An Arecibo search for pulsars and transient sources in M33
NDR Bhat, JM Cordes, PJ Cox, JS Deneva, TH Hankins, TJW Lazio, MA McLaughlin
Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2011
Abstract
We report on a systematic and sensitive search for pulsars and transient sources in the nearby spiral galaxy M33, conducted at 1.4 GHz with the Arecibo telescope's seven-beam receiver system, ALFA. Data were searched for both periodic and aperiodic sources, up to 1000 pc cm-3in dispersion measure and on timescales from ∼50μs to several seconds. The galaxy was sampled with 12 ALFA pointings, or 84pixels in total, each of which was searched for 2-3hr. We describe the observations, search methodologies, and analysis strategies applicable to multibeam systems, and comment on the data quality and statistics of spurious events that arise due to radio frequency interference. While these searches ha..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Arun Venkataraman for his assistance in transport of the large data volume to Swinburne University. This research was supported by NSF grant AST0807151 to Cornell University and an internal grant from Swinburne University. N.D.R.B. acknowledges the support received through the ANSTO travel grant 06/07-O-02 and a research grant from AAS, and thanks Matthew Bailes for continued support and encouragement extended to this project. M.A.M. is supported by an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and by WVEPSCOR. T.H.H. acknowledges partial support from NSF grant AST-0607492. We thank Willem van Straten for fruitful discussions and Sarah Burke-Spolaor for software assistance related to event analysis. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the referee, Scott Ransom, for providing comments that helped to improve the clarity of some parts of the paper. The Arecibo Observatory is operated by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center under a cooperative agreement to Cornell University.