• DOI:10.1038/nature04440
• Corpus ID: 4402381

Transient radio bursts from rotating neutron stars

@article{Mclaughlin2006TransientRB,
  title={Transient radio bursts from rotating neutron stars},
  author={Maura Mclaughlin and Andrew G. Lyne and Duncan R. Lorimer and Michael Kramer and Andrew J. Faulkner and Richard N. Manchester and James M. Cordes and Fernando Camilo and Andrea Possenti and Ingrid H. Stairs and George Hobbs and Nicolo' D'Amico and Marta Burgay and John T. O’Brien},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2006},
  volume={439},
  pages={817-820}
}

• M. Mclaughlin, A. Lyne, +11 authors J. O’Brien
• Published 19 November 2005
• Physics
• Nature

The radio sky is relatively unexplored for transient signals, although the potential of radio-transient searches is high. This was demonstrated recently by the discovery of a previously unknown type of source, varying on timescales of minutes to hours. Here we report a search for radio sources that vary on much shorter timescales. We found eleven objects characterized by single, dispersed bursts having durations between 2 and 30 ms. The average time intervals between bursts range from 4 min to 3 h with radio emission typically detectable for <1 s per day. From an analysis of the burst arrival times, we have identified periodicities in the range 0.4–7 s for ten of the eleven sources, suggesting origins in rotating neutron stars. Despite the small number of sources detected at present, their ephemeral nature implies a total Galactic population significantly exceeding that of the regularly pulsing radio pulsars. Five of the ten sources have periods >4 s, and the rate of change of the pulse period has been measured for three of them; for one source, we have inferred a high magnetic field strength of 5 × 1013 G. This suggests that the new population is related to other classes of isolated neutron stars observed at X-ray and γ-ray wavelengths.