Discoveries of Rotating Radio Transients in the 350 MHz Green Bank Telescope Drift-scan Survey

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of approximately 30 new Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) using advanced single-pulse detection techniques in data from the Green Bank Telescope's 350 MHz survey, significantly expanding known RRATs.

Contribution

The paper introduces new post-processing methods for automatic detection of RRATs, leading to the discovery of numerous new candidates in existing survey data.

Findings

Approximately 30 new RRAT candidates identified

6 RRATs confirmed through follow-up observations

Detection techniques improve sensitivity to sporadic radio bursts

Abstract

Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) are a class of pulsars characterized by sporadic bursts of radio emission, which make them difficult to detect in typical periodicity-based pulsar searches. Using newly developed post-processing techniques for automatically identifying single bright astrophysical pulses, such as those emitted from RRATs, we have discovered approximately 30 new RRAT candidates in data from the Green Bank Telescope 350 MHz drift-scan survey. A total of 6 of these have already been confirmed and the remainder look extremely promising. Here we describe these techniques and present the most recent results on these new RRAT candidates.