English

The FAST Globular Cluster Pulsar Survey (GC FANS)

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-06-11 v2

Abstract

By January 2025, 60 pulsars were discovered by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope globular cluster (GC) pulsar survey (GC FANS), with spin periods spanning 1.98 ms to 3960.72 ms. Of these, 55 are millisecond pulsars (MSPs; P<30P<30 ms), while 34 are binaries with orbital periods spanning 0.12 days to 466.47 days. This paper describes GC FANS, a deep, thorough search for pulsars in 41 GCs in the FAST sky (14<δ<65-14^\circ < \delta < 65^\circ) and describes new discoveries in 14 of them. We present updated timing solutions for M92A, NGC 6712A, M71A, and M71E, all of which are ``spider'' pulsars with short orbital periods. We present new timing solutions for M71B, C, and D. With orbital periods of \sim466 and 378 days, M71B and M71C are the widest known GC binaries; these systems resemble the normal wide MSP-He WD systems in the Galactic disk. With a spin period of 101 ms, M71D is in an eccentric (ee\sim0.63) orbit with an 11-day period and a massive companion; the system has a total mass of 2.63±0.08M2.63 \pm 0.08 \, M_{\odot}. These features and its large characteristic age suggest it is a double neutron star system (DNS) formed via massive binary evolution early in the cluster's history, akin to Galactic disk DNSs--unlike other candidate GC DNSs, which typically form dynamically. A comparative analysis of GC pulsar populations within FAST's sky reveals that most clusters (10 of 14) resemble the Galactic disk MSP population, likely due to lower stellar densities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.07970,
  title  = {The FAST Globular Cluster Pulsar Survey (GC FANS)},
  author = {Yujie Lian and Zhichen Pan and Haiyan Zhang and Shuo Cao and P. C. C. Freire and Lei Qian and Ralph P. Eatough and Lijing Shao and Scott M. Ransom and Duncan R. Lorimer and Dejiang Yin and Yinfeng Dai and Kuo Liu and Lin Wang and Yujie Wang and Zhongli Zhang and Zhonghua Feng and Baoda Li and Minghui Li and Tong Liu and Yaowei Li and Bo Peng and Yu Pan and Yuxiao Wu and Liyun Zhang and Xingnan Zhang and Peng Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.07970},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

28 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJS