Publication Details

AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH

earth and planetary sciences

Three millisecond pulsars in Fermi LAT unassociated bright sources

Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 727, No. 1 PART II, Year 2011

We searched for radio pulsars in 25 of the non-variable, unassociated sources in the Fermi LAT Bright Source List with the Green Bank Telescope at 820 MHz. We report the discovery of three radio and γ-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from a high Galactic latitude subset of these sources. All of the pulsars are in binary systems, which would have made them virtually impossible to detect in blind γ-ray pulsation searches. They seem to be relatively normal, nearby (≤2 kpc) MSPs. These observations, in combination with the Fermi detection of γ-rays from other known radio MSPs, imply that most, if not all, radio MSPs are efficient γ-ray producers. The γ-ray spectra of the pulsars are power law in nature with exponential cutoffs at a few GeV, as has been found with most other pulsars. The MSPs have all been detected as X-ray point sources. Their soft X-ray luminosities of ∼10 30-1031 erg s-1 are typical of the rare radio MSPs seen in X-rays. © 2011. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

Statistics
Citations: 139
Authors: 34
Affiliations: 19
Research Areas
Disability