TRAPUM pulsar and transient search in the Sextans A and B galaxies and discovery of background FRB 20210924D
E. Carli, L. Levin, B. W. Stappers, E. D. Barr, R. P. Breton, S., Buchner, M. Burgay, M. Kramer, P. V. Padmanabh, A. Possenti, V. Venkatraman, Krishnan, S. S. Sridhar, J. D. Turner

TL;DR
This study used MeerKAT to search for pulsars in the dwarf galaxies Sextans A and B, setting new sensitivity limits and discovering a background fast radio burst, but found no pulsars within these galaxies.
Contribution
First deep radio search for pulsars in Sextans A and B, establishing new luminosity limits and identifying a background FRB with MeerKAT.
Findings
No pulsars detected in Sextans A and B.
Set a new upper limit on pulsar luminosity in these galaxies.
Detected a background fast radio burst unrelated to the galaxies.
Abstract
The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds are the only galaxies outside our own in which radio pulsars have been discovered to date. The sensitivity of the MeerKAT radio interferometer offers an opportunity to search for a population of more distant extragalactic pulsars. The TRAPUM (TRansients And PUlsars with MeerKAT) collaboration has performed a radio-domain search for pulsars and transients in the dwarf star-forming galaxies Sextans A and B, situated at the edge of the local group 1.4 Mpc away. We conducted three 2-hour multi-beam observations at L-band (856-1712 MHz) with the full array of MeerKAT. No pulsars were found down to a radio pseudo-luminosity upper limit of 7.90.4 Jy kpc at 1400 MHz, which is 28 times more sensitive than the previous limit from the Murriyang telescope. This luminosity is 30 per cent greater than that of the brightest known radio pulsar and sets a…
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