Observing pulsars and fast transients with LOFAR

By B. W. Stappers, Jason W. T. Hessels, A. Alexov, K. Anderson, T. Coenen, T. Hassall, A. Karastergiou, V. Kondratiev, M. Kramer, J. V. Leeuwen and 84 more. 2011

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low frequency radio waves, while challenging to observe, are a rich source of information about pulsars. The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) is a new radio interferometer operating in the lowest 4 octaves of the ionospheric "radio window": 10-240 MHz, that will greatly facilitate observing pulsars at low radio frequencies. Through the huge collecting area, long baselines, and flexible digital hardware, it is expected that LOFAR will revolutionize radio astronomy at the lowest frequencies visible from Earth. LOFAR is a next-generation radio telescope and a pathfinder to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), in that it incorporates advanced multi-beaming techniques between thousands of individual elements. We discuss the motivation for low-frequency pulsar observations in general and the potential of LOFAR in addressing these science goals. We present LOFAR as it is designed to perform high-time-resolution observations of pulsars and other fast transients, and outline the various relevant observing modes and data reduction pipelines that are already or will soon be implemented to facilitate these observations. A number of results obtained from commissioning observations are presented to demonstrate the exciting potential of the telescope. This paper outlines the case for low frequency pulsar observations and is also intended to serve as a reference for upcoming pulsar/fast transient science papers with LOFAR.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eb037e80585946a071848f61e39184234c99c07

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Citations in the corpus

On the origin of a highly dispersed coherent radio burst (2012, background): “Transient signals detected in the future with LOFAR, and other next generation wide field-of-view telescopes, where rapid localisation, classification, multi-wavelength followup, and the detection of any associated gravitational wave signal (e.g. with Advanced LIGO) will be possible, lead us to beli”
Measurement and correction of variations in interstellar dispersion in high-precision pulsar timing (2012, unknown): “Clearly use of low-frequency antennas such as Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT; Joshi & Ramakrishna 2006) or Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR; Stappers et al. 2011) for correcting DM fluctuations in PTAs will have to be limited to weakly scattered pulsars.”
THE IMPACT OF POINT-SOURCE SUBTRACTION RESIDUALS ON 21 cm EPOCH OF REIONIZATION ESTIMATION (2012, methodology): “…used to calibrate the instrument (e.g., Murchison Widefield Array—MWA,1 Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization—PAPER,2 Low Frequency Array—LOFAR,3 Long Wavelength Array—LWA;4 Lonsdale et al. 2009; Tingay et al. 2012; Parsons et al. 2010; Stappers et al. 2011; Ellingson et al. 2009).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, background): “These are the European LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR; Stappers et al. 2011; van Haarlem et al. 2013), the Long-Wavelength Array (LWA) in New Mexico (Dowell et al. 2013) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA; Bhat et al. 2014) in Western Australia.”
LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray (2013, background): “…visibilities, LOFAR’s beam-formed modes can either combine the LOFAR collecting area into “array beams”- i.e. the coherent or incoherent sum of multiple station beams - or return the un-correlated station beams from one or more stations (see also Stappers et al. 2011; Mol & Romein 2011).”
Frequency-dependent effects of gravitational lensing within plasma (2015, background): “Thus, despite the low frequencies involved the interplay between GR and plasma effects in pulsars may potentially be within observable ranges (Popov et al. 2006; Malov & Malofeev 2010; Stappers et al. 2011).”