The GBT350 Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane for Radio Pulsars and Transients

TL;DR

This survey of the Northern Galactic Plane using the GBT at 350MHz discovered 33 new pulsars, nearly doubling known pulsars in that region, with improved sensitivity to slow and millisecond pulsars.

Contribution

The paper presents a new, more sensitive survey of the Northern Galactic Plane that identified 33 new pulsars, including some via single bursts, expanding the known pulsar population.

Findings

Discovered 33 new pulsars in the surveyed region.

Survey is four times more sensitive to slow pulsars and ten times to MSPs.

Identified some sources through single dispersed bursts.

Abstract

Using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Pulsar Spigot at 350MHz, we have surveyed the Northern Galactic Plane for pulsars and radio transients. This survey covers roughly 1000 square degrees of sky within 75 deg < l < 165 deg and |b| < 5.5 deg, a region of the Galactic Plane inaccessible to both the Parkes and Arecibo multibeam surveys. The large gain of the GBT along with the high time and frequency resolution provided by the Spigot make this survey more sensitive by factors of about 4 to slow pulsars and more than 10 to millisecond pulsars (MSPs), compared with previous surveys of this area. In a preliminary, reduced-resolution search of all the survey data, we have discovered 33 new pulsars, almost doubling the number of known pulsars in this part of the Galaxy. While most of these sources were discovered by normal periodicity searches, 5 of these sources were first identified through single, dispersed bursts. We discuss the interesting properties of some of these new sources. Data processing using the data's full-resolution is ongoing, with the goal of uncovering MSPs missed by our first, coarse round of processing.