Pulsars, transients and relativistic astrophysics

Abstract:

We describe the design and deployment of GREENBURST, a commensal Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search system at the Green Bank Telescope. GREENBURST uses the dedicated L-band receiver tap to search over the 960$-$1920 MHz frequency range for pulses with dispersion measures out to $10^4$ pc cm$^{-3}$. Due to its unique design, GREENBURST will obtain data even when the L-band receiver is not being used for scheduled observing. This makes it a sensitive single pixel detector capable of reaching deeper in the radio sky. While single pulses from Galactic pulsars and rotating radio transients will be detectable in our observations, and will form part of the database we archive, the primary goal is to detect and study FRBs. Based on recent determinations of the all-sky rate, we predict that the system will detect approximately one FRB for every 2$-$3 months of continuous operation. The high sensitivity of GREENBURST means that it will also be able to probe the slope of the FRB source function, which is currently uncertain in this observing band.

Abstract:

© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society Stars passing too close to a black hole can produce tidal disruption events (TDEs), when the tidal force across the star exceeds the gravitational force that binds it. TDEs have usually been discussed in relation to massive black holes that reside in the centres of galaxies or lurk in star clusters. We investigate the possibility that triple stars hosting a stellar black hole (SBH) may be sources of TDEs. We start from a triple system made up of three main-sequence stars and model the supernova (SN) kick event that led to the production of an inner binary comprised of an SBH. We evolve these triples with a high-precision N-body code and study their TDEs as a result of Kozai-Lidov oscillations. We explore a variety of distributions of natal kicks imparted during the SN event, various maximum initial separations for the triples, and different distributions of eccentricities. We show that the main parameter that governs the properties of the SBH-MS binaries that produce a TDE in triples is the mean velocity of the natal kick distribution. Smaller σ's lead to larger inner and outer semimajor axes of the systems that undergo a TDE, smaller SBH masses, and longer time-scales. We find that the fraction of systems that produce a TDE is roughly independent of the initial conditions, while estimate a TDE rate of 2.1 × 10−4-4.7 yr−1, depending on the prescriptions for the SBH natal kicks. This rate is almost comparable to the expected TDE rate for massive black holes.