A New Search of Unidentified Radio Point Sources for Fast Pulses and Bursts

We are searching 92 unidentified sources from the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty Centimeters (FIRST) and NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) 1400 MHz radio survey catalogs in an attempt to detect fast millisecond (or possibly submillisecond) pulsars and short radio bursts that might have been missed by previous surveys. The selected sources are bright, pointlike, and more than 5% linearly polarized, and have no identification with extragalactic objects. These sources were previously observed with the Jodrell Bank Telescope and searched for radio pulsations by Crawford, Kaspi, & Bell (2000). We have observed these sources again using the 43-m Telescope at NRAO in Green Bank. We employed the West Virginia Ultimate Pulsar Processor Instrument (WUPPI), which is capable of recording spectral samples every 0.00006144 seconds. WUPPI was configured for 800 MHz bandwidth, with 4096 channels, centered on 1200 MHz sky frequency. The much wider bandwidth used in this search allows a better discrimination between interference and dispersed radio signals and reduces the likelihood of missing pulsars due to scintillation. The repetition of this search at a different observing epoch is warranted, since emission from compact objects has been observed to be highly time variable in some cases. We report on the progress of this survey.