Pulsar science with the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope

¹ Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Alan Turing Building, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK e-mail: Roy.Smits@manchester.ac.uk
² Department of Physics, Hodges Hall, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA
³ National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank Observatory, PO Box 2, Green Bank, WV 24944, USA
⁴ Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Huegel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany
⁵ Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO, PO Box 76, Epping NSW 1710, Australia
⁶ National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences Chaoyang District, Datun Road, A.20, Beijing 100012, PR China
⁷ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Dr. Pasadena, CA 91109, USA

Received: 24 February 2009
Accepted: 7 August 2009

Abstract

With a collecting area of 70 000 m², the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will allow for great advances in pulsar astronomy. We have performed simulations to estimate the number of previously unknown pulsars FAST will find with its 19-beam or possibly 100-beam receivers for different survey strategies. With the 19-beam receiver, a total of 5200 previously unknown pulsars could be discovered in the Galactic plane, including about 460 millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Such a survey would take just over 200 days with eight hours survey time per day. We also estimate that, with about 80 six-hour days, a survey of M 31 and M 33 could yield 50–100 extra-Galactic pulsars. A 19-beam receiver would produce just under 500 MB of data per second and requires about 9 tera-ops to perform the major part of a real time analysis. We also simulate the logistics of high-precision timing of MSPs with FAST. Timing of the 50 brightest MSPs to a signal-to-noise of 500 would take about 24 h per epoch.