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Session 111 - Pulsars.
Display session, Saturday, January 10
Exhibit Hall,
The Parkes and Jodrell Bank multibeam pulsar surveys use the fast rate of sky coverage afforded by new multibeam receivers to greatly increase the integration time and, therefore, sensitivity to fast, young pulsars located along the Galactic plane. The Parkes survey, with 13 beams at a central sky frequency of 1374 MHz, equivalent system noise of 36 Jy, 288 MHz bandwidth, and 35 minutes integration per grid position, can detect long period pulsars with flux densities in excess of about 0.15 mJy. This is a factor of 7 more sensitive than the highly successful 1400 MHz survey of Johnston et al. (1992) that discovered 46 pulsars. A sample interval of 0.25 ms also makes this the first 21 cm survey with significant sensitivity to detecting the population of millisecond pulsars. To date we have analyzed data corresponding to about 5% of the entire survey, and have already discovered over 60 new pulsars, including at least two in binary systems. Eventually we expect to discover 300--400 pulsars, thereby increasing the known population of radio pulsars by about 50%. Many of these systems will be young, and therefore prone to `glitches' and to being associated with supernova remnants, and to displaying significant levels of x- and gamma-ray emission. In this paper we describe the survey and early results.
