Pulsar surveys present and future: The Arecibo pulsar-ALFA survey and projected SKA survey

J. S. Deneva

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Pulsar surveys present and future: The Arecibo pulsar-ALFA survey and projected SKA survey

J. S. Deneva

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Abstract

The Arecibo Pulsar-ALFA (PALFA) survey of the Galactic plane began in 2004 when the new ALFA (Arecibo L-band Feed Array) receiver was commissioned. It is slated to continue for the next 3-5 years and is expected to discover hundreds of new pulsars. We present the goals, progress, and recent discoveries of the PALFA survey. So far preliminary data processing has found 24 new pulsars, one of which is a young 144ms pulsar in a highly relativistic binary with an orbital period of 3.98 hours. Another object exhibits sporadic bursts characteristic of a newly defined class of radio-loud neutron stars: RRATs (Rotating RAdio Transients). The PALFA survey is going to accumulate a total of 1 Petabyte (PB) of raw data which will be made available to the community via a sophisticated tape archive and database hosted at the Cornell Theory Center supercomputing facility. Web tools and services are being developed which will allow users of the archive to perform data analysis remotely. We also discuss parameters, expected discoveries and the scientific impact of a projected pulsar survey with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). The SKA is to become operational in 2014 and will have the capability of detecting thousands of pulsars not detectable with current instruments, allowing us to perform a comprehensive census of the Galactic pulsar population.

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J. S. Deneva. 2007-01-08. Pulsar surveys present and future: The Arecibo pulsar-ALFA survey and projected SKA survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701181

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