The MPIfR–MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey – I. System set-up and early results

Abstract

Galactic plane radio surveys play a key role in improving our understanding of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. Performing such a survey using the latest interferometric telescopes produces large data rates necessitating a shift towards fully or quasi-real-time data analysis with data being stored for only the time required to process them. We present here the overview and setup for the 3000 hour Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) MeerKAT Galactic Plane survey (MMGPS). The survey is unique by operating in a commensal mode, addressing key science objectives of the survey including the discovery of new pulsars and transients as well as studies of Galactic magnetism, the interstellar medium and star formation rates. We explain the strategy coupled with the necessary hardware and software infrastructure needed for data reduction in the imaging, spectral and time domains. We have so far discovered 78 new pulsars including 17 confirmed binary systems of which two are potential double neutron star systems. We have also developed an imaging pipeline sensitive to the order of a few tens of micro-Jansky with a spatial resolution of a few arcseconds. Further science operations with an in-house built S-Band receiver operating between 1.7-3.5 GHz are about to commence. Early spectral line commissioning observations conducted at S-Band, targeting transitions of the key molecular gas tracer CH at 3.3 GHz already illustrate the spectroscopic capabilities of this instrument. These results lay a strong foundation for future surveys with telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The ALMA Survey of Star Formation and Evolution in Massive Protoclusters with Blue Profiles (ASSEMBLE): Core Growth, Cluster Contraction, and Primordial Mass Segregation

“…This absence of hot cores has been confirmed by crossmatching with the ALMA Band 3 data set, ensuring their nonexistence (Qin et al 2022). In the case of the protocluster I14382-6017, the extended spherical morphology of H40α line emission is spatially consistent with the MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey 1.28 GHz data (Padmanabh et al 2023;S. Goedhart et al 2023, in preparation).…”

“…In Appendix A, we present additional information on the radio emission derived from the MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey 1.28 GHz data (Padmanabh et al 2023;S. Goedhart et al 2023, in preparation).…”

“…The radio counterpart and the environment atlas of the ASSEMBLE protoclusters are shown in Figure 14. The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT images (Padmanabh et al 2023;S. Goedhart et al 2023, in preparation) of the ASSEMBLE protoclusters are shown with yellow contours, with logarithmically spaced levels starting from 5σ to the peak flux.…”

On the Spin Period Distribution of Millisecond Pulsars

“…Currently, more than 3000 pulsars have been discovered, among which ∼560 are millisecond pulsars (MSPs; see PSRCAT; 6 Manchester et al 2005). Both numbers will increase significantly in the next few years when new telescopes like the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and MeerKAT complete their first rounds of pulsar surveys (Smits et al 2009b;Li et al 2018;Han et al 2021;Padmanabh et al 2023). More importantly, when the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is used for pulsar searches, the numbers are expected to further grow severalfold (Smits et al 2009a), possibly finding a large fraction of all Milky Way pulsars that are beaming toward the Earth (Keane et al 2015).…”

Chandra X-Ray Observatory Observations of 13 Fermi LAT Sources

“…unpublished information from the 3PC group), and we use these locations for the rest of the paper, except for PSR J1306 −6043, for which we use the original position from the radio observations(Padmanabh et al 2023).We also checked whether X-ray sources were detected within the γ-ray PUs in the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) survey of unassociated Fermi LAT sources 15(Stroh & Falcone 2013) and in the Living Swift XRT Point Source Catalogue (LSXPS;Evans et al 2023). …”