Parkes observations for project P944 semester 2017APRS_BPSR_05

We propose here to search for new young pulsars in the SMC. Our strategy is to target nine new, optically verified, SNR remnants from the XMM Newton survey of the SMC. Detecting a single pulsar associated with a SNR in the SMC will provide important insights about the nature of the pulsar population in the SMC and the progenitor stars that formed it. In addition finding a young pulsar in a binary with a massive star will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of high mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) in different metallicity environments and different galaxies, as well as the formation rates of double neutron star binaries. Knowledge of the population of these sources will be crucial in the era of gravitational wave detections with Advanced Ligo and Virgo. Therefore it is essential that we make the deepest, most sensitive observations possible to either detect the young radio pulsars or place constraints on any radio emission associated with the candidate remnants. To achieve this we propose to take a nine hour integration per target, resulting in a limiting flux density of 0.016 mJy - ultimately improving the limiting flux density of previous SMC surveys by a factor of two.

本研究旨在小麦哲伦星系（Small Magellanic Cloud, SMC）中搜寻全新的年轻脉冲星。我们的观测策略选取9个经光学验证的超新星遗迹（Supernova Remnant, SNR）作为目标源，这些遗迹源自针对SMC开展的XMM-牛顿（XMM-Newton）巡天项目。若能在小麦哲伦星系中探测到与超新星遗迹相关的脉冲星，将有助于深入理解该星系内脉冲星种群的特性，以及形成该遗迹的前身恒星。此外，若发现与大质量恒星组成双星系统的年轻脉冲星，将助力我们理解不同金属丰度环境与不同星系中大质量X射线双星（High Mass X-ray Binaries, HMXBs）的演化过程，以及双中子星双星的形成速率。在先进激光干涉引力波天文台（Advanced LIGO）与室女座干涉仪（Virgo）开展引力波探测的时代，对这类源种群的认知至关重要。因此，我们有必要开展最深灵敏度的观测，以期探测到年轻射电脉冲星，或是对候选遗迹相关的射电辐射给出严格约束。为达成这一目标，我们计划为每个观测目标开展9小时的积分观测，最终将探测极限流量密度提升至0.016 mJy，较此前SMC巡天的极限流量密度灵敏度提升一倍。