Discovery of 30 Galactic radio transient pulsars with MeerTRAP

Journal article

We present the discovery of 30 new Galactic sources from the MeerTRAP project, a commensal fast radio transient search programme using the MeerKAT telescope. These sources were all identified via a single-pulse search. Most of them are likely to be rotating radio transients given their low pulse rates. Using data captured in our transient buffer, we have localized nine sources in the image domain to arcsecond precision. This facilitates the timing of these sources and further follow-up with other telescopes. Using the arrival times of single pulses, we have constrained the periods of 14 sources, ranging from 121 ms to 7.623 s, and derived a phase-coherent timing solution for one of them. Follow-up observations of the MeerTRAP sources (including those published previously) performed with the Effelsberg telescope have detected regular but faint emission from three sources, confirming their long rotation period, including PSR J2218+2902 with a period of 17.5 s, the fourth slowest in the radio pulsar population. A few of the sources exhibit interesting emission features, such as periodic microstructure in PSR J1243−0435 and possible nulling in PSR J1911−2020 and PSR J1243−0435. We find that the duty cycles of the three newly discovered pulsars are very low and follow the general trend for the duty cycle with period of known pulsars.

Authors: Tian, J; Singh, S; Stappers, BW; Turner, JD; Rajwade, KM

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 544
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1843-1860
• Publication date: 2025-10-22
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-20
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1827
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English
• Keywords: stars: neutron; pulsars: general; radio continuum: transients