Alex McEwen (UMBC) - GBT 820 MHz Pulsar Survey: Discoveries and Follow-up

Abstract: Radio surveys have discovered more than 3000 widely-varied pulsars, all of which play an important role in understanding the population and as exotic laboratories for studies of gravitation and stellar evolution. The GBT’s sensitivity and flexibility make it an excellent instrument to search large regions of the Galaxy for new sources that continue to fill in gaps in our understanding of their behavior. In this talk, I will discuss results from the Green Bank 820 MHz pulsar survey of the Cygnus region of the Galaxy. This region has a rich stellar history, making it a prime target for a deep search for young pulsars. With a survey coverage of approximately 173 square degrees, the search detected six new pulsars, one of which is in a tight binary orbit (4.5 hour orbital period). Several of the sources have dispersion measures that place them at or beyond the maximum predicted for this line of sight, suggesting an underestimation of the electron density. For a subset of these, we make multi-frequency observations that allow for measurement of scattering in the pulse profiles, many of which are at the upper edge of predictions for their assumed distance. Aside from these interesting sources, I will discuss the survey’s sensitivity and the impacts of our results on Galactic modeling.