Searching for extragalactic pulsars with MeerKAT

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, with a very stable rotation, making them excellent laboratories for astrophysical research. The field of pulsar research is ever expanding, with the discovery of new unique sources with applications ranging from studying the evolution of supermassive black holes in the early Universe to testing theories of gravity. This project will make use of data from the recently completed MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, to search for previously unknown pulsars in the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Clouds are two dwarf galaxies, located close to the Milky Way and the only external galaxies where pulsars have been discovered so far. The excellent sensitivity of the MeerKAT array implies that a full survey of the clouds should discover eight times as many pulsars as are currently known.
In this project, you will search the MeerKAT data using so-called acceleration searching to account for changes in the pulse period of pulsars in close binary systems, and sift through the large number of expected pulsar candidates using machine learning techniques