Search for a Radio Pulsar in the Remnant of Supernova 1987A

Understand

We have observed the remnant of supernova SN~1987A (SNR~1987A), located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), to search for periodic and/or transient radio emission with the Parkes 64\,m-diameter radio telescope.

• We found no evidence of a radio pulsar in our periodicity search and derived 8$\sigma$ upper bounds on the flux density of any such source of $31\,\mu$Jy at 1.4~GHz and $21\,\mu$Jy at 3~GHz.
• Four candidate transient events were detected with greater than $7\sigma$ significance, with dispersion measures (DMs) in the range 150 to 840\,cm$^{-3}\,$pc.
• For two of them, we found a second pulse at slightly lower significance.