A Stacked FFT Search for Pulsar Signals in the Triangulum Galaxy

To date no periodic radio pulsars or sporadically emitting (bursting) neutron stars have been discovered in spiral galaxies other than our own Milky Way Galaxy. Finding the first such pulsar in a nearby spiral galaxy would be a significant step toward understanding the pulsar population and how pulsars evolve in another galaxy. One of the nearby spiral galaxy, the Triangulam Glaxy (M33), is close enough to us that detecting pulsars in it has become a real possibility. Despite extensive data collection and analysis efforts using Arecibo radio observations, the standard search methods have yielded no definitive pulsar detections within the galaxy. Consequently, our project endeavors to enhance our sensitivity in pulsar signal detection by using the Stacked FFT search method. This approach involves combining power spectra from multiple observations of the same telescope targeting the same object, thereby enhancing our capacity to detect pulsars. This method was initially proposed and applied to the search for pulsars in the globular cluster Terzan 5 by Cadelano et al. (2018), leading to the discovery of three new millisecond pulsars. In this project, we apply this method to our extensive dataset, including over 20 hours of observations for M33, with the aim of detection of pulsars in this nearby spiral galaxy.