A search for dispersed radio bursts in archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey data

Abstract

A number of different classes of potentially extra-terrestrial bursts of radio emission have been observed in surveys with the Parkes 64m radio telescope, including "Rotating Radio Transients", the "Lorimer burst" and "perytons". Rotating Radio Transients are radio pulsars which are best detectable in single-pulse searches. The Lorimer burst is a highly dispersed isolated radio burst with properties suggestive of extragalactic origin. Perytons share the frequency-swept nature of the Rotating Radio Transients and Lorimer burst, but unlike these events appear in all thirteen beams of the Parkes Multibeam receiver and are probably a form of peculiar radio frequency interference. In order to constrain these and other radio source populations further, we searched the archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey data for events similar to any of these. We did not find any new Rotating Radio Transients or bursts like the Lorimer burst. We did, however, discover four peryton-like events. Similar to the perytons, these four bursts are highly dispersed, detected in all thirteen beams of the Parkes multibeam receiver, and have pulse widths between 20--30 ms. Unlike perytons, these bursts are not associated with atmospheric events like rain or lightning. These facts may indicate that lightning was not responsible for the peryton phenomenon. Moreover, the lack of highly dispersed celestial signals is the evidence that the Lorimer burst is unlikely to belong to a cosmological source population.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in MNRAS; 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (17)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• The Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey: I. Observing and Data Analysis Systems, Discovery and Timing of 100 Pulsars
• Transient radio bursts from rotating neutron stars
• The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey: VI. Discovery and timing of 142 pulsars and a Galactic population analysis
• Searches for Fast Radio Transients
• Cosmic Dispersion Measure from Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows: Probing the Reionization History and the Burst Environment
• Probing the Cosmic Reionization History and Local Environment of Gamma-Ray Bursts through Radio Dispersion
• RRATs: New Discoveries, Timing Solutions & Musings
• Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA: Probing Radio Pulsar Intermittency and Transients
• Radio Bursts with Extragalactic Spectral Characteristics Show Terrestrial Origins
• The Millisecond Radio Sky: Transients from a Blind Single Pulse Search
• Is pulsar B0656+14 a very nearby RRAT source?
• Discovery of 28 pulsars using new techniques for sorting pulsar candidates
• Cosmic Sparks from Superconducting Strings
• Radio precursors to neutron star binary mergings
• On the possible observational manifestation of supernova shock impact on the neutron star magnetosphere
• A Search for Sub-Millisecond Pulsars

Cited by in corpus (14)

• A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances
• Fast Radio Burst Discovered in the Arecibo Pulsar ALFA Survey
• Giant Sparks at Cosmological Distances?
• Coherent Emission in Fast Radio Bursts
• Local Circumnuclear Magnetar Solution to Extragalactic Fast Radio Bursts
• Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope
• On the detectability of extragalactic fast radio transients
• An absence of fast radio bursts at intermediate galactic latitudes
• The discovery and scientific potential of fast radio bursts
• Detection of Dispersed Radio Pulses: A machine learning approach to candidate identification and classification
• Short-duration Radio Bursts with Apparent Extragalactic Dispersion
• What Perytons Aren't, and Might Be
• Wavelet Denoising of Radio Observations of Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs): Improved Timing Parameters for Eight RRATs
• Are perytons signatures of ball lightning?