Discovery of a 36-minute long-period transient ASKAP J142431.2-612611

Abstract

We report the discovery of a new long-period radio transient, ASKAP J142431.2-612611, with a 36 minute period, identified in the Australian SKA Pathfinder Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey. We detected pulsed emission from ASKAP J142431.2-612611 over a period of eight days during follow-up observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array, after which the source appears to have switched off. No optical or near-infrared counterpart is detected in archival surveys or in targeted Gemini South FLAMINGOS-2 observations. During its active state, the source exhibits a stable pulse profile with fractional polarisation consistent with 100%, evolving from elliptically to linearly polarised and tracing a well-defined great-circle trajectory on the Poincaré sphere. We show that this behaviour is consistent with fully linearly polarised intrinsic emission modified by propagation through a linearly polarised birefringent medium. This discovery expands the known population of long-period transients and highlights the intermittent nature of their activity. We discuss the implications for proposed models of long-period transients and outline future observations needed to constrain the origin of their intermittency and polarisation properties.