The SKA will be transformational for many areas of science, but in particular for the study of neutron stars and their usage as tools for fundamental physics in the form of radio pulsars. Since the last science case for the SKA, numerous and unexpected advances have been made broadening the science goals even further. With the design of SKA Phase 1 being finalised, it is time to confront the new knowledge in this field, with the prospects promised by this exciting new telescope. While technically challenging, we can build our expectations on recent discoveries and technical developments that have reinforced our previous science goals.
A significant fraction of the observing time with the two phase-I SKA telescopes (SKA1-LOW and SKA1-MID) will be spent on Key Science Projects led by member country scientists. The various SKA Science Working Groups, including the VLBI Focus Group are in the process of defining KSPs that are aligned with the High Priority Science Objectives of the SKA. At the moment it is not clear how the special observing mode of SKA-VLBI - when the SKA1 components are phased-up and included in VLBI networks - could be incorporated in KSPs. The VLBI community needs to be prepared by the time the KSP proposal…
The Square Kilometre Array will be an amazing instrument for pulsar astronomy. While the full SKA will be sensitive enough to detect all pulsars in the Galaxy visible from Earth, already with SKA1, pulsar searches will discover enough pulsars to increase the currently known population by a factor of four, no doubt including a range of amazing unknown sources. Real time processing is needed to deal with the 60 PB of pulsar search data collected per day, using a signal processing pipeline required to perform more than 10 POps. Here we present the suggested design of the pulsar search engine for …
There are two types of timing irregularities seen in pulsars: glitches and timing noise. Both of these phenomena can help us probe the interior of such exotic objects. This article presents a brief overview of the observational and theoretical aspects of pulsar timing irregularities and the main results from the investigations of these phenomena in India. The relevance of such Indian programs for monitoring of young pulsars with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is presented, highlighting possible contributions of the Indian neutron star community to the upcoming SKA endeavour.
FPGA-based Matched Filter Group Optimisation for SKA Pulsar Search Engine
PARC Lab, University of Auckland（奥克兰大学）；Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Raman Research Institute, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学拉曼研究所）
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA, https://skatelescope.org) will be the world's largest radio telescope. SKA Science Data Challenges will be regularly issued to the community as part of the science preparatory activities. The purpose of these challenges is to inform the development of the data reduction workflows, to allow the science community to get familiar with the standard products the SKA will deliver, and optimise their analyses to extract science from them. These challenges may consist of real data from currently operating radio facilities or of simulated SKA data. The purpose of this d…
The upcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope will become the largest astronomical observation facility, and is expected to introduce revolutionary changes in major fields of natural sciences. These revolutionary changes help us to answer the fundamental questions related to the origins of the universe, life, cosmic magnetic field, the nature of gravity, and to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The unprecedented power of the SKA is characterized by an extremely high sensitivity, wide field of view, ultra-fast survey speed, and ultra-high time, space, frequency resolutions,…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), with the aim of achieving a collecting area of one square kilometre, will be the world's largest radio telescope. A scientific collaboration between 12 countries (with more to join), it will consist of one Observatory with 2 telescopes located in South Africa and Australia. The telescope deployment is planned in two phases, but even in its first stage (SKA1) it will already enable transformational science in a broad range of scientific objectives. The inclusion of SKA1 in the Global VLBI networks (SKA-VLBI) will provide access to very high angular resolution t…
Recently, a full-scale data processing workflow of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Phase 1 was successfully executed on the world's fastest supercomputer Summit, proving that scientists have the expertise, software tools and computing resources to process the SKA data. The SKA-Summit experiment shows the importance of multidisciplinary cooperation between astronomy, computer science and others communities. The SKA science cannot be achieved without the joint efforts of talents from multiple fields.
Prospects for Discovering Pulsars in Future Continuum Surveys Using Variance Imaging
在Dai等人（2016）中，我们开发了一种形式主义，用于从包含时间和频率信息的标准干涉无线电图像计算方差图像。方差成像与未来的无线电连续调查，使我们能够识别无线电脉冲星，并作为一个补充，传统的脉冲星搜索是最敏感的严格的周期性信号。在这里，我们进行模拟来预测我们可以在未来的连续调查中使用方差成像发现的卫星数量。我们表明，澳大利亚SKA探路者（ASKAP）的宇宙进化图（EMU）调查可以发现$\sim30$正常的恒星和$\sim40$毫秒恒星（MSP）超过和超过今天已知的数量，同样的，一个全天空连续调查与SKA-MID可以发现$\sim140$正常的恒星和$\sim110$ MSP与此技术。EMU和SKA-MID的方差成像将检测具有大占空比的双星，因此是在相对论双星系统中寻找MSP和双星的潜在工具。与目前在南半球银河系高纬度地区进行的脉冲星调查相比，EMU和SKA-MID的方差成像将更加灵敏，并将能够探测色散测量值在$\sim10$和100 cm $^{-3}$ pc之间的脉冲星。
50-250 MHz Pulsar Census with an SKA-Low prototype station: Spectra and Polarization
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Curtin University（国际射电天文研究中心，科廷大学）；SKAO, Science Operations Centre, CSIRO ARRC（平方公里阵列望远镜组织，科学运营中心，CSIRO ARRC）
In order to deliver the full science potential of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope, several SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) will be required to be constructed in different SKA member countries around the world. These SRCs will provide high performance compute and storage for the generation of advanced science data products from the basic data streams generated by the SKA Science Data Handling and Processing system, critically necessary to the success of the key science projects to be carried out by the SKA user community. They will also provide support to astronomers to enable them to ca…
Supermassive black holes are commonly found in the center of galaxies and evolve with their hosts. The supermassive binary black holes (SMBBH) are thus expected to exist in close galaxy pairs, however, none has been unequivocally detected. The square kilometre array (SKA) is a multi-purpose radio telescope with a collecting area approaching 1 million square metres, with great potential for detecting nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper, we quantify the GW detectability by SKA for a realistic SMBBH population using pulsar timing array (PTA) technique and quantify its impact on rev…
FIP-TOI: Fast Imaging Pipeline for Pulsar Localisation with a Transient-Oriented Radio Astronomical Imager
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Silesian University in Opava（奥帕瓦西里西亚大学）；Mila - Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院特别天体物理观测站）
Trinity College Dublin（都柏林三一学院）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；Université d’Orléans（奥尔良大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-ICE)（空间科学研究所（CSIC-ICE））；Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC)（加泰罗尼亚空间研究研究所（IEEC））；ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）
Highlights are presented about the science to be done with SKA. as well as state of the art science already done today with its precursors (MeerKAT, ASKAP) and pathfinders (LOFAR, NenuFAR), with accent on the expected breakthroughs.
This paper presents the High-Performance computing efforts with FPGA for the accelerated pulsar/transient search for the SKA. Case studies are presented from within SKA and pathfinder telescopes highlighting future opportunities. It reviews the scenario that has shifted from offline processing of the radio telescope data to digitizing several hundreds/thousands of antenna outputs over huge bandwidths, forming several 100s of beams, and processing the data in the SKA real-time pulsar search pipelines. A brief account of the different architectures of the accelerators, primarily the new generati…
Understanding the Neutron Star Population with the SKAO telescopes
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；The Institute of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学研究所）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国立学院）；INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari（意大利国家天体物理研究所卡利亚里天文台）；Swinburne University of Technology（斯威本科技大学）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie（马克斯·普朗克射电天文研究所）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Raman Research Institute（拉曼研究所）；Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC)（空间科学研究所）；Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC)（加泰罗尼亚空间研究学院）
Decades long monitoring of millisecond pulsars, which exhibit highly stable rotational periods, in pulsar timing array experiments is on the threshold of discovering nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background. This paper describes the Indian Pulsar timing array (InPTA) experiment, which employs the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) for timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars for this purpose. We highlight InPTA's observation strategies and analysis methods, which are relevant for a future PTA experiment with the more sensitive Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope. We…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project consists of delivering two largest radio telescope arrays being built by the SKA Observatory (SKAO), which is an intergovernmental organization bringing together nations from around the world with China being one of the major member countries. The computing resources needed to process, distribute, curate and use the vast amount of data that will be generated by the SKA telescopes are too large for the SKAO to manage on its own. To address this challenge, the SKAO is working with the international community to create a shared, distributed data, computing…
This decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will perform its first observations. Preparations for building dishes, antennas, correlators and infrastructure are well underway. Concurrently, software for the processing of SKA observations is developed at a number of levels. At a more basic level there are the telescope monitoring and control systems and also the correlator software. On top of that, in order to deliver science ready data products, software pipelines are needed for radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation, averaging, calibration and imaging. Here, we focus on the SAGECal ca…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), when it becomes functional, is expected to enrich neutron star (NS) catalogues by at least an order of magnitude over their current state. This includes the discovery of new NS objects leading to better sampling of under-represented NS categories, precision measurements of intrinsic properties such as spin period and magnetic field, as also data on related phenomena such as microstructure, nulling, glitching, etc. This will present a unique opportunity to seek answers to interesting and fundamental questions about the extreme physics underlying these exotic ob…
New developments in data processing and visualization are being made in preparation for upcoming radioastronomical surveys planned with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and its precursors. A major goal is enabling extraction of science information from the data in a mostly automated way, possibly exploiting the capabilities offered by modern computing infrastructures and technologies. In this context, the integration of source analysis algorithms into data visualization tools is expected to significantly improve and speed up the cataloguing process of large area surveys. To this aim, the CIRAS…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the largest radio interferometer under construction in the world. The high accuracy, wide-field and large size imaging significantly challenge the construction of the Science Data Processor (SDP) of SKA. We propose a hybrid imaging method based on improved W-Stacking and snapshots. The w range is reduced by fitting the snapshot $uv$ plane, thus effectively enhancing the performance of the improved W-Stacking algorithm. We present a detailed implementation of WS-Snapshot. With full-scale SKA1-LOW simulations, we present the imaging performance and imaging qua…
This white book stems from the contributions presented at the Portuguese SKA Days, held on the 6th and 7th February 2018 with the presence of the SKA Deputy Director General Alistair McPherson and the SKA Science Director Robert Braun. This initiative was held to promote the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) - the world's largest radio telescope - among the Portuguese scientific and business communities with support from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) with the contribution of Portuguese policy makers and researchers. The meeting was very successful in providing a detailed ov…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be both the largest radio telescope ever constructed and the largest Big Data project in the known Universe. The first phase of the project will generate on the order of 5 zettabytes of data per year. A critical task for the SKA will be its ability to process data for science, which will need to be conducted by science pipelines. Together with polarization data from the LOFAR Multifrequency Snapshot Sky Survey (MSSS), we have been developing a realistic SKA-like science pipeline that can handle the large data volumes generated by LOFAR at 150 MHz. The pipe…
The upgraded GMRT (uGMRT) with its unprecedented sensitivity and high figure of merit, is expected to result in the discovery of a large population of pulsars including pulsars of previously unknown type. In the phase-2 of the GMRT High Resolution Southern Sky (GHRSS) survey with the uGMRT we will reach 1/4th of sensitivity of the SKA Phase-1. In this paper we highlight the salient features of the survey of pulsars and fast transients with the uGMRT highlighting its discovery potential. The extended GMRT (eGMRT) equipped with wide field- of-view, increased collecting area will have unprecedent…
The authors discuss potential remarkable achievements for pulsar science with the FAST (pulsar monitoring, timing and searching, as well as others related), and expect a FAST era of pulsar science to come.
