Pulsar Candidate Searching
Visual candidate inspection provided an introduction to the practical signatures of pulsars and the challenges of separating astrophysical sources from noise and interference.
Overview
I began in pulsar research by analysing folded diagnostic plots and identifying promising pulsar candidates. I examined candidates from the Arecibo drift-scan database and from searches targeting Fermi gamma-ray sources.
These visual evaluations looked for the characteristic signatures of real pulsar detections while rejecting radio-frequency interference and other false positives. The broader goal was to discover millisecond pulsars that could become useful additions to pulsar-timing arrays such as NANOGrav.