Rotating Radio Transient - Discovery

Discovery

After the discovery of pulsars in 1967, searches for more pulsars relied on two key characteristics of pulsar pulses in order to distinguish pulsars from noise caused by terrestrial radio signals. The first is the periodic nature of pulsars. By performing periodicity searches through data, "pulsars are detected with much higher signal-to-noise ratios" than when simply looking for individual pulses. The second defining characteristic of pulsar signals is the dispersion in frequency of an individual pulse, due to the frequency dependence of the phase velocity of an electromagnetic wave that travels through an ionized medium. As the interstellar medium features an ionized component, waves traveling from a pulsar to Earth are dispersed, and thus pulsar surveys also focused on searching for dispersed waves. The importance of the combination of the two characteristics is such that in initial data processing from the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey, which is the largest pulsar survey to date, "no search sensitive to single dispersed pulses was included."

After the survey itself had finished, searches began for single dispersed pulses. About a quarter of the pulsars already detected by the survey were found by searching for single dispersed pulses, but there were 17 sources of single dispersed pulses which were not thought to be associated with a pulsar. During follow-up observations, a few of these were found to be pulsars that had been missed in periodicity searches, but 11 sources were characterized by single dispersed pulses, with irregular intervals between pulses lasting from minutes to hours.