Discovery of an Extremely Intermittent Periodic Radio Source

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of an extremely intermittent long-period radio pulsar, possibly a magnetar, with unique emission properties suggesting a new class of transient neutron stars.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of a highly intermittent, long-period radio source with potential magnetar characteristics, expanding the known neutron star population.

Findings

Detected 97 bright pulses in a single epoch over three years

Localized the source to 0.5" precision via radio imaging

No X-ray or multi-frequency counterparts found

Abstract

We report the serendipitous discovery of an extremely intermittent radio pulsar, PSR J1710-3452, with a relatively long spin period of 10.4 s. The object was discovered through the detection of 97 bright radio pulses in only one out of 66 epochs of observations spanning almost three years. The bright pulses have allowed the source to be localised to a precision of 0.5" through radio imaging. We observed the source location with the Swift X-ray telescope but did not detect any significant X-ray emission. We did not identify any high-energy bursts or multi-frequency counterparts for this object. The solitary epoch of detection hinders the calculation of the surface magnetic field strength, but the long period and the microstructure in the single-pulses resembles the emission of radio-loud magnetars. If this is indeed a magnetar, it is located at a relatively high Galactic latitude (2.9 degree), making it potentially one of the oldest and the most intermittent magnetars known in the Galaxy. The very short activity window of this object is unique and may point towards a yet undetected population of long period, highly transient radio emitting neutron stars.