Collaborative research: Completing the most sensitive low-frequency survey for radio pulsars and transients

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Scientists at two universities will work together to study the sky with a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Their project will look to find rapid radio wavelength variations on timescales that would indicate the discovery of millisecond pulsars. Such pulsars can then be precisely timed to allow the detection of gravitational waves. Additionally, other newly discovered radio variable sources will reveal other interesting astronomical objects. Puerto Rican high school students will be involved in analyzing the data.A research team at George Mason University and West Virginia University will observe the entire night sky visible from the Arecibo Observatory at high time cadence. The primary science goal is to discover millisecond pulsars that will add to the NANOGrav pulsar timing array for nanohertz gravitational wave detection and the resultant probing of black hole binaries with much higher masses. Simulations using suitable search parameters estimate that the full survey will discover 20-30 millisecond pulsars and 150-200 normal pulsars. A well-tested software pipeline, and candidate classification tools that utilize modern inductive machine learning algorithms, will ensure that the data processing analysis will proceed swiftly. The survey will also allow exploration of fast radio bursts, and high brightness millisecond-duration radio bursts coming from cosmological distances.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.