Thirteen new pulsars discovered with MeerKAT

Tomasz Nowakowski is a writer for Phys.org.

13 new pulsars have been detected by an international team of astronomer using the MeerKAT radio telescope. Twelve of them were millisecond pulsars. The discovery was reported on the arXiv pre-print server.

The rotating neutron stars emit a beam of radiation. They are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission.

The most rapidly rotating pulsars are known as MSPs. They are thought to be formed in a pair of systems when one component becomes a neutron star and the other becomes a secondary star.

Astronomers led by Alessandro Ridolfi of the Cagliari Observatory in Italy have found 13 new sources that are part of the pulsar family. The new pulsars were found in the globular cluster NGC 1851, which is 39,000 light years away.

We present the results of our search for new pulsars in NGC 1851 using observations made in the context of the TRAPUM GC survey, as well as follow-up observations taken within the MeerTime program.

There are 13 newfound pulsars located in the innermost regions. Only one of them is a standard pulsar and it has a spin period of 32.65 milliseconds. The other sources have spin periods from 2.82 to 6.63 milliseconds. Out of the 13 objects, seven of them are binaries and the rest are isolated pulsars.

Two of the 13 pulsars reported in the study have peculiar properties. There is a heavy white dwarf companion with a mass of around 0.48 solar mass. The system has an eccentric level of 0.86, making it the fifth most eccentricbinary known to date. There is a companion star in a very eccentric binaries with a mass of 1.53 solar mass.

In all likelihood, the original star that recycled the pulsar was replaced by the heavier companion in a secondary exchange encounter.

The authors of the paper said that their discovery made the cluster one of the most populated. There are 14 pulsars identified in this GC as the first one, which was detected in 2004. The TRAPUM survey will increase the known population of pulsars in several other GCs.

More information: A. Ridolfi et al, TRAPUM discovery of thirteen new pulsars in NGC 1851 using MeerKAT. arXiv:2203.12302v1 [astro-ph.HE], arxiv.org/abs/2203.12302

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