Distributed computing project Einstein@Home discovers 13 new gamma-ray pulsars January 11, 2017 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! A gamma-ray pulsar is a compact neutron star that accelerates charged particles to relativistic speeds in its extremely strong magnetic field. This process produces gamma radiation (violet) far above the surface of the compact remains of the star, for example, while radio waves (green) are emitted over the magnetic poles in the form of a cone. The rotation moves the emission regions across the terrestrial line of sight, making the pulsar light up periodically in the sky. Credit: © NASA/Fermi/Cruz de Wilde An analysis that would have taken more than a thousand years on a single computer has found within one year more than a dozen new rapidly rotating neutron stars in data from the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. With computing power donated by volunteers from all over the world an international team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany, searched for tell-tale periodicities in 118 Fermi sources of unknown nature. In 13 they discovered a rotating neutron star at the heart of the source. While these all are – astronomically speaking – young with ages between tens and hundreds of thousands of years, two are spinning surprisingly slow – slower than any other known gamma-ray pulsar. Another discovery experienced a "glitch", a sudden change of unknown origin in its otherwise regular rotation. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-einsteinhome-gamma-ray-pulsars.html#jCp
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/1...D2A945D4EA8BE4E839C.c4.iopscience.cld.iop.org THE EINSTEIN@HOME GAMMA-RAY PULSAR SURVEY. I. SEARCH METHODS, SENSITIVITY, AND DISCOVERY OF NEW YOUNG GAMMA-RAY PULSARS: Abstract We report on the results of a recent blind search survey for gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data being carried out on the distributed volunteer computing system, Einstein@Home. The survey has searched for pulsations in 118 unidentified pulsar-like sources, requiring about 10,000 years of CPU core time. In total, this survey has resulted in the discovery of 17 new gamma-ray pulsars, of which 13 are newly reported in this work, and an accompanying paper. These pulsars are all young, isolated pulsars with characteristic ages between 12 kyr and 2 Myr, and spin-down powers between 1034 and 4 × 1036 erg s−1. Two of these are the slowest spinning gamma-ray pulsars yet known. One pulsar experienced a very large glitch Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! during the Fermi mission. In this, the first of two associated papers, we describe the search scheme used in this survey, and estimate the sensitivity of our search to pulsations in unidentified Fermi-LAT sources. One such estimate results in an upper limit of 57% for the fraction of pulsed emission from the gamma-ray source associated with the Cas A supernova remnant, constraining the pulsed gamma-ray photon flux that can be produced by the neutron star at its center. We also present the results of precise timing analyses for each of the newly detected pulsars.
