ICTS:32993

An update on TRAPUM

(2025). An update on TRAPUM. SciVideos. https://scivideos.org/index.php/icts-tifr/32993

An update on TRAPUM. SciVideos, Oct. 17, 2025, https://scivideos.org/index.php/icts-tifr/32993 

          @misc{ scivideos_ICTS:32993,
            doi = {},
            url = {https://scivideos.org/index.php/icts-tifr/32993},
            author = {},
            keywords = {},
            language = {en},
            title = {An update on TRAPUM},
            publisher = {},
            year = {2025},
            month = {oct},
            note = {ICTS:32993 see, \url{https://scivideos.org/index.php/icts-tifr/32993}}
          }
Prajwal Voraganti Padmanabh
Talk numberICTS:32993
Source RepositoryICTS-TIFR

Abstract

Now approaching completion, the TRAPUM (TRAnsients and PUlsars with MeerKAT) project has ushered in a new era of pulsar discovery. Over its 5 year campaign, TRAPUM has systematically targeted globular clusters, nearby galaxies and high-energy sources lacking known radio counterparts, yielding hundreds of new pulsars—including a remarkable population of fast-spinning millisecond pulsars (MSPs) as well as slow pulsars. Among these are numerous exotic binaries, such as black widow and redback systems, double neutron star systems as well as a surge of new pulsars in the Magellanic Clouds. A highlight is a candidate neutron star–black hole binary in NGC 1851, potentially probing the elusive LIGO “mass gap.”

These discoveries have been enabled by TRAPUM’s dedicated multibeam beamformer and GPU-based high-time-resolution processing system, technologies that have dramatically expanded MeerKAT’s capability for wide-field, sensitive pulsar searches. This infrastructure has also allowed quasi-real-time data analysis, demonstrating the survey’s potential as a technical and scientific pathfinder for the SKA.

As TRAPUM nears its conclusion, its instrumentation, methodologies, and scientific outcomes highlight the transformative power of interferometric pulsar surveys and provide crucial lessons for the next generation of large-scale radio time-domain projects.