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The recently started Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA) pulsar survey aims to find ~1000 new pulsars. Due to its high time and frequency resolution the survey is especially sensitive to millisecond pulsars, which have the potential to test gravitational theories, detect gravitational waves and probe the neutron-star equation of state. Here we report the results of our preliminary analysis: in the first months we have discovered 21 new pulsars. One of these, PSR J1906+0746, is a young 144-ms pulsar in a highly relativistic 3.98-hr low-eccentricity orbit. The 2.61 +- 0.02 solar-mass system is expected to coalesce in ~300 Myr and contributes significantly to the computed cosmic inspiral rate of compact binary systems.
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We present radio transient search algorithms, results, and statistics from the ongoing Arecibo Pulsar ALFA (PALFA) Survey of the Galactic plane. We have discovered seven objects by detecting isolated dispersed pulses and one of the new discoveries has a duty cycle of 0.01%, the smallest known. The impact of selection effects on the detectability and classification of intermittent sources is discussed, and the relative efficiencies of periodicity vs. single pulse searches are compared for various pulsar classes. We find that scintillation, off-axis detection and few rotation periods within an observation may misrepresent normal periodic pulsars as intermittent sources. Finally, we derive constraints on transient pulse rate and flux density from the PALFA survey parameters and results.
The on-going PALFA survey at the Arecibo Observatory began in 2004 and is searching for radio pulsars in the Galactic plane at 1.4 GHz. Observations since 2009 have been made with new wider-bandwidth spectrometers than were previously employed in this survey. A new data reduction pipeline has been in place since mid-2011 which consists of standard methods using dedispersion, searches for accelerated periodic sources, and search for single pulses, as well as new interference-excision strategies and candidate selection heuristics. This pipeline has been used to discover 41 pulsars, including 8 millisecond pulsars (MSPs; P < 10 ms), bringing the PALFA surveys discovery totals to 145 pulsars, including 17 MSPs, and one Fast Radio Burst (FRB). The pipeline presented here has also re-detected 188 previously known pulsars including 60 found in PALFA data by re-analyzing observations previously searched by other pipelines. A comprehensive description of the survey sensitivity, including the effect of interference and red noise, has been determined using synthetic pulsar signals with various parameters and amplitudes injected into real survey observations and subsequently recovered with the data reduction pipeline. We have confirmed that the PALFA survey achieves the sensitivity to MSPs predicted by theoretical models. However, we also find that compared to theoretical survey sensitivity models commonly used there is a degradation in sensitivity to pulsars with periods P >= 100 ms that gradually becomes up to a factor of ~10 worse for P > 4 s at DM < 150 pc/cc. This degradation of sensitivity at long periods is largely due to red noise. We find that 35 +- 3% of pulsars are missed despite being bright enough to be detected in the absence of red noise. This reduced sensitivity could have implications on estimates of the number of long-period pulsars in the Galaxy.
We have conducted a deep, complete HI survey, using Arecibo/ALFA, of a field centered on the nearby, isolated galaxy, NGC 2903, which is similar to the Milky Way in its properties. The field size was 150 kpc x 260 kpc and the final velocity range spanned from 100 to 1133 km/s. The ALFA beams have been mapped as a function of azimuth and cleaned from each azimuth-specific cube prior to forming final cubes. The final HI data are sensitive down to an HI mass of 2 x 10^5 Mo and column density of 2 x 10^{17} cm^{-2} at the 3sigma x 2deltaV level, where sigma is the rms noise level and deltaV is the velocity resolution. NGC 2903 is found to have an HI envelope that is larger than previously known, extending to at least 3 times the optical diameter of the galaxy. Our search for companions yields one new discovery with an HI mass of 2.6 x 10^6 Mo. The companion is 64 kpc from NGC 2903 in projection, is likely associated with a small optical galaxy of similar total stellar mass, and is dark matter dominated, with a total mass >10^8 Mo. In the region surveyed, there are now two known companions: our new discovery and a previously known system that is likely a dwarf spheroidal, lacking HI content. If HI constitutes 1% of the total mass in all possible companions, then we should have detected 230 companions, according to LCDM predictions. Consequently, if this number of dark matter clumps are indeed present, then they contain less than 1% HI content, possibly existing as very faint dwarf spheroidals or as starless, gasless dark matter clumps.
We present the catalog of ~31500 extragalactic HI line sources detected by the completed ALFALFA survey out to z < 0.06 including both high signal-to-noise ratio (> 6.5) detections and ones of lower quality which coincide in both position and recessional velocity with galaxies of known redshift. We review the observing technique, data reduction pipeline, and catalog construction process, focusing on details of particular relevance to understanding the catalogs compiled parameters. We further describe and make available the digital HI line spectra associated with the catalogued sources. In addition to the extragalactic HI line detections, we report nine confirmed OH megamasers and ten OH megamaser candidates at 0.16 < z < 0.22 whose OH line signals are redshifted into the ALFALFA frequency band. Because of complexities in data collection and processing associated with the use of a feed-horn array on a complex single-dish antenna in the terrestrial radio frequency interference environment, we also present a list of suggestions and caveats for consideration by users of the ALFALFA extragalactic catalog for future scientific investigations.
We present the third installment of HI sources extracted from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA extragalactic survey. This dataset continues the work of the Virgo ALFALFA catalog. The catalogs and spectra published here consist of data obtained during the 2005 and 2006 observing sessions of the survey. The catalog consists of 578 HI detections within the range 11h 36m < R.A.(J2000) < 13h 52m and +08 deg < Dec.(J2000) < +12 deg, and cz_sun < 18000 km/s. The catalog entries are identified with optical counterparts where possible through the examination of digitized optical images. The catalog detections can be classified into three categories: (a) detections of high reliability with S/N > 6.5; (b) high velocity clouds in the Milky Way or its periphery; and (c) signals of lower S/N which coincide spatially with an optical object and known redshift. 75% of the sources are newly published HI detections. Of particular note is a complex of HI clouds projected between M87 and M49 that do not coincide with any optical counterparts. Candidate objects without optical counterparts are few. The median redshift for this sample is 6500 km/s and the cz distribution exhibits the local large scale structure consisting of Virgo and the background void and the A1367-Coma supercluster regime at cz_sun ~7000 km/s. Position corrections for telescope pointing errors are applied to the dataset by comparing ALFALFA continuum centroid with those cataloged in the NRAO VLA Sky Survey. The uncorrected positional accuracy averages 27 arcsec ~(21 arcsec ~median) for all sources with S/N > 6.5 and is of order ~21 arcsec ~(16 arcsec ~median) for signals with S/N > 12. Uncertainties in distances toward the Virgo cluster can affect the calculated HI mass distribution.
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