Pulsar science with the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope

TL;DR

This paper estimates the pulsar discovery potential of FAST, a large radio telescope, through simulations of survey strategies, predicting thousands of new pulsars including millisecond pulsars and extragalactic pulsars, and discusses data and timing logistics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation-based estimates of pulsar yields and survey logistics for FAST, including potential discoveries and data processing requirements.

Findings

FAST could discover over 5200 new pulsars in the Galactic plane.

A survey of M31 and M33 could find 50-100 extragalactic pulsars.

High-precision timing of MSPs is feasible within 24 hours per epoch.

Abstract

With a collecting area of 70 000 m^2, the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will allow for great advances in pulsar astronomy. We have performed simulations to estimate the number of previously unknown pulsars FAST will find with its 19-beam or possibly 100-beam receivers for different survey strategies. With the 19-beam receiver, a total of 5200 previously unknown pulsars could be discovered in the Galactic plane, including about 460 millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Such a survey would take just over 200 days with eight hours survey time per day. We also estimate that, with about 80 six-hour days, a survey of M31 and M33 could yield 50--100 extra-Galactic pulsars. A 19-beam receiver would produce just under 500 MB of data per second and requires about 9 tera-ops to perform the major part of a real time analysis. We also simulate the logistics of high-precision timing of MSPs with FAST. Timing of the 50 brightest MSPs to a signal-to-noise of 500 would take about 24 hours per epoch.