Discovery of a young, highly scattered pulsar PSR J1032-5804 with the Australian SKA Pathfinder

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a young, highly scattered pulsar using ASKAP, highlighting the potential of radio continuum surveys to find extreme pulsars and improve understanding of the interstellar medium.

Contribution

The discovery of PSR J1032-5804 demonstrates the effectiveness of continuum surveys in detecting highly scattered pulsars previously missed by surveys.

Findings

Pulsar PSR J1032-5804 has a dispersion measure of 819 pc cm$^{-3}$.

It exhibits an extreme scattering timescale at 1 GHz (~3845 ms).

The pulsar's environment may include a pulsar wind nebula or supernova remnant.

Abstract

We report the discovery of a young, highly scattered pulsar in a search for highly circularly polarized radio sources as part of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) survey. In follow-up observations with Murriyang/Parkes, we identified PSR J1032-5804 and measured a period of 78.7 ms, dispersion measure (DM) of 819$\pm$4 pc cm$^{-3}$, rotation measure of -2000$\pm$1 rad m$^{-2}$, and a characteristic age of 34.6 kyr. We found a pulse scattering timescale at 3 GHz of ~22 ms, implying a timescale at 1 GHz of ~3845 ms, which is the third most scattered pulsar known and explains its non-detection in previous pulsar surveys. We discuss the identification of a possible pulsar wind nebula and supernova remnant in the pulsar's local environment by analyzing the pulsar spectral energy distribution and the surrounding extended emission from multiwavelength images. Our result highlights the possibility of identifying extremely scattered pulsars from radio continuum images. Ongoing and future large-scale radio continuum surveys will offer us an unprecedented opportunity to find more extreme pulsars (e.g., highly scattered, highly intermittent, highly accelerated), which will enhance our understanding of the characteristics of pulsars and the interstellar medium.