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Register a new userRotating Radio Transients and Their Place Among Pulsars
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Added by
Sarah Burke-Spolaor
Publication date
2012
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
S. Burke-Spolaor
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Six years ago, the discovery of Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) marked what appeared to be a new type of sparsely-emitting pulsar. Since 2006, more than 70 of these objects have been discovered in single-pulse searches of archival and new surveys. With a continual inflow of new information about the RRAT population in the form of new discoveries, multi-frequency follow-ups, coherent timing solutions, and pulse rate statistics, a view is beginning to form of the place in the pulsar population RRATs hold. Here we review the properties of neutron stars discovered through single pulse searches. We first seek to clarify the definition of the term RRAT, emphasising that the RRAT population encompasses several phenomenologies. A large subset of RRATs appear to represent the tail of an extended distribution of pulsar nulling fractions and activity cycles; these objects present several key open questions remaining in this field.
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The rotating radio transients are sporadic pulsars which are difficult to detect through periodicity searches. By using a single-pulse search method, we can discover these sources, measure their periods, and determine timing solutions. Here we introduce our results on six RRATs based on Parkes and Green Bank Telescope(GBT) observations, along with a comparison of the spin-down properties of RRATs and normal pulsars.
We have conducted two pilot surveys for radio pulsars and fast transients with the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) around 140 MHz and here report on the first low-frequency fast-radio burst limit and the discovery of two new pulsars. The first survey, the LOFAR Pilot Pulsar Survey (LPPS), observed a large fraction of the northern sky, ~1.4 x 10^4 sq. deg, with 1-hr dwell times. Each observation covered ~75 sq. deg using 7 independent fields formed by incoherently summing the high-band antenna fields. The second pilot survey, the LOFAR Tied-Array Survey (LOTAS), spanned ~600 sq. deg, with roughly a 5-fold increase in sensitivity compared with LPPS. Using a coherent sum of the 6 LOFAR Superterp stations, we formed 19 tied-array beams, together covering 4 sq. deg per pointing. From LPPS we derive a limit on the occurrence, at 142 MHz, of dispersed radio bursts of < 150 /day/sky, for bursts brighter than S > 107 Jy for the narrowest searched burst duration of 0.66 ms. In LPPS, we re-detected 65 previously known pulsars. LOTAS discovered two pulsars, the first with LOFAR or any digital aperture array. LOTAS also re-detected 27 previously known pulsars. These pilot studies show that LOFAR can efficiently carry out all-sky surveys for pulsars and fast transients, and they set the stage for further surveying efforts using LOFAR and the planned low-frequency component of the Square Kilometer Array.
Over the past several years, it has become apparent that some radio pulsars demonstrate significant variability in their single pulse amplitude distributions. The Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs), pulsars discovered through their single, isolated pulses, are one of the more extreme manifestations of this variability. Nearly 70 of these objects have been found over the past several years in archival and new pulsar surveys. In this review, we describe these searches and their resulting discoveries. We then discuss radio timing algorithms and the spin-down properties of the 19 RRATs with phase-connected solutions. The spin-down parameters fall within the same range as other pulsars, with a tendency towards longer periods and higher magnetic fields. Next we describe follow-up observations at radio wavelengths. These show that there are periodic fluctuations in the pulse detection rates of some RRATs and that RRATs in general have similar spectra to other pulsars. X-ray detection has only been made for one RRAT, J1819-1458; observations have revealed absorption features and a bright X-ray nebula. Finally, we look to future telescopes and the progress that will be made with these in characterising and understanding the Galactic RRAT population.
We report on the first near-infrared observations obtained for Rotating RAdio Transients (RRATs). Using adaptive optics devices mounted on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), we observed two objects of this class: RRAT J1819-1458, and RRAT J1317-5759. These observations have been performed in 2006 and 2008, in the J, H and Ks bands. We found no candidate infrared counterpart to RRAT J1317-5759, down to a limiting magnitude of Ks ~ 21. On the other hand, we found a possible candidate counterpart for RRAT J1819-1458, having a magnitude of Ks=20.96+/-0.10 . In particular, this is the only source within a 1 sigma error circle around the sources accurate X-ray position, although given the crowded field we cannot exclude that this is due to a chance coincidence. The infrared flux of the putative counterpart to the highly magnetic RRAT J1819-1458, is higher than expected from a normal radio pulsar, but consistent with that seen from magnetars. We also searched for the near-infrared counterpart to the X-ray diffuse emission recently discovered around RRAT J1819-1458, but we did not detect this component in the near-infrared band. We discuss the luminosity of the putative counterpart to RRAT J1819-1458, in comparison with the near-infrared emission of all isolated neutron stars detected to date in this band (5 pulsars and 7 magnetars).
We describe our studies of the radio and high-energy properties of Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs). We find that the radio pulse intensity distributions are log-normal, with power-law tails evident in two cases. For the three RRATs with coverage over a wide range of frequency, the mean spectral index is -1.7pm0.1, roughly in the range of normal pulsars. We do not observe anomalous magnetar-like spectra for any RRATs. Our 94-ks XMM-Newton observation of the high magnetic field RRAT J1819-1458 reveals a blackbody spectrum (kT ~130 eV) with an unusual absorption feature at ~1 keV. We find no evidence for X-ray bursts or other X-ray variability. We performed a correlation analysis of the X-ray photons with radio pulses detected in concurrent observations with the Green Bank, Effelsberg, and Parkes telescopes. We find no evidence for any correlations between radio pulse emission and X-ray photons, perhaps suggesting that sporadicity is not due to variations in magnetospheric particle density but to changes in beaming or coherence.
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