SHAO Astrophysics Colloquium

Title: The Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey by using the FAST

Speaker: JinLin Han  (NAOC)

Time: 3:00 pm, October 15th (Thursday) 

Location: Lecture hall, 3rd floor

Abstract: Discovery of pulsars is one of main goals for large radio telescopes. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Tetelscope (FAST) has the largest collecting area for radio waves, with an aperture of 300~m in diameter. Mounted with the 19-beam L-band receiver with a system temperature of about 20 K, it is the most sensitive radio telescope to discover pulsars. We designed the {\it snapshot} observation mode for beam-switching of the 19-beam receiver to observe {\it a cover} of a sky area of 0.15 square degree by four pointings, and carry out the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey. The integration time for each pointing is 300, so that the GPPS observations for a cover can be made in 21 minutes. The goal of the GPPS survey is to discover pulsars first within 5 degree of the Galactic latitudes from the Galactic plane and later to 10 degree. Up to now, observations of about 250 hours result in discoveries of 107pulsars. In addition, 10 fast radio bursts not associated with any pulsars have been detected. The follow-up confirmation observations of new pulsars with polarization-signals recorded produce good polarization profiles for strong pulsars, from which the Faraday rotation can be measured and hence the interstellar magnetic fields in far spiral arms in the first Galactic quadrant are probed. Re-detection of known pulsars in the survey data also leads significant improvements of pulsar parameters, and emission properties of some pulsars are revealed by the GPPS sensitive observations. The GPPS survey results are published and will be updated in http://zmtt.bao.ac.cn/GPPS/.