Mining the time axis with TRON - III. Discovery of a nulling pulsar towards the SMC with MeerKAT

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ID: 328261
2026
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Abstract
Abstract We report on the discovery of a nulling pulsar, PSR J0052−7551, in archival MeerKAT L-band observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The discovery was made using the image-plane transient detection pipeline, TRON, which creates a residual image for each time sample and uses a heuristic pruning strategy to identify promising candidates in the resulting temporal image cube. The TRON pipeline triggered on the approximately minute timescale variability associated with the nulling behaviour of a canonical pulsar. Follow-up MeerKAT UHF-band beamformer observations revealed a pulsar with a spin period of 0.55 s and a measured period derivative of 6.1(6) × 10−17 s s−1. The source is seen in projection toward the periphery of the SMC, and has a dispersion measure value of 29.24(2) pc cm−3, which is on the order of the expected Milky Way contribution along the line of sight. We use a Gaussian Mixture Model to fit the nulling behaviour which yielded a nulling fraction of ∼32%. We find that the null lengths are consistent with an exponential distribution indicating a stochastic process. Additionally, power spectra of the UHF visibility data reveal an unexplained quasi-periodic feature at ∼5–7 s that cannot be attributed to the source itself, RFI, or standard instrumental effects. Following on from previous image-plane detections of pulsars by the TRON approach, which relied on either scintillation or eclipsing behaviour, this is the first detection triggered by nulling. This discovery confirms TRON’s sensitivity to a wide range of astrophysical phenomena of medium timescale duration.
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Authors T Blecher, M. Geyer, O. Smirnov, A Coelen, Ian Heywood, Ingrid Pelisoli, A K Hughes, Joe Bright, V Prayag, T Myburgh, C Tasse, B. Hugo, J S Kenyon, H L Bester, S J Perkins, J Dawson, V G Samboco, A J T Ramaila, B Ngcebetsha, I Sihlangu, Carmen Choza, V. S. Dhillon, N Castro Segura, J McCormac
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Journal monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/mnras/stag1704
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1704
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