A LOFAR radio search for single and periodic pulses from M31

Abstract

Bright, short radio bursts are emitted by sources at a large range of distances: from the nearby Crab pulsar to remote Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). FRBs are likely to originate from distant neutron stars, but our knowledge of the radio pulsar population has been limited to the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. In an attempt to increase our understanding of extragalactic pulsar populations, and its giant-pulse emission, we employed the low-frequency radio telescope LOFAR to search the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) for radio bursts emitted by young, Crab-like pulsars. For direct comparison we also present a LOFAR study on the low-frequency giant pulses from the Crab pulsar; their fluence distribution follows a power law with slope 3.04(3). A number of candidate signals were detected from M31 but none proved persistent. FRBs are sometimes thought of as Crab-like pulsars with exceedingly bright giant pulses -- given our sensitivity, we can rule out that M31 hosts pulsars more than an order of magnitude brighter than the Crab pulsar, assuming their pulse scattering follows that of the known FRBs.

Accepted for publication in A&A. 6 pages with 4 nice figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: I. Project design and pulsar discoveries
• Dual-frequency single-pulse study of PSR B0950+08
• The EXOD search for faint transients in XMM-Newton observations: Method and discovery of four extragalactic Type I X-ray Bursters
• Discovery of PSR J0523-7125 as a Circularly Polarized Variable Radio Source in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Birth and Evolution of Fast Radio Bursts: Strong Population-Based Evidence for a Neutron-Star Origin
• The Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS): Design, Commissioning, Data Release, and Detection of the first 5 Fast Radio Bursts
• Multi-dimensional population modelling using frbpoppy: magnetars can produce the observed Fast Radio Burst sky
• First Results from the REAL-time Transient Acquisition backend (REALTA) at the Irish LOFAR station
• Narrow-band giant pulses from the Crab pulsar
• Global Sky Models can Improve Flux Estimates in Pulsar and FRB Studies
• An Arecibo Search for Fast Radio Transients from M87
• A deep search for radio pulsations from the 1.3 M${}_{\odot }$ compact-object binary companion of young pulsar PSR J1906+0746
• Measurements of the Crab Pulsar's Giant Radio Pulse Amplitude Power-Law Index Using Low-Frequency Arecibo and Green Bank Telescope Observations