Latest efforts in the hunt for Black Widow and Redback pulsars with Fermi-LAT
Abstract
Since its launch ~6 years ago, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi has been extremely successful at discovering new pulsars, both directly in the gamma-ray band and through dedicated radio searches of LAT gamma-ray sources with pulsar-like qualities. Among the most interesting pulsars found by the LAT are members of the so-called Black-Widow (BW) and Redback (RB) families. These systems consist of a millisecond pulsar in a tight circular orbit around a small mass companion (from ~0.01 to ~0.1 of a solar mass, for BWs and RBs respectively) that is being "eaten" away by the high-energy radiation from the pulsar. To date, most BW and RB pulsars have been discovered in radio searches of Fermi-LAT unassociated sources. Radio searches, however, are often severely hampered by the absorption and scattering in the material ablated from the companion. Blind searches for BW/RB pulsars in gamma rays are not subject to such issues but instead are complicated by the long integration times necessary, requiring dedicated multi-wavelength (optical and X-ray) campaigns to severely constrain the orbital parameters of the system. We will describe our latest efforts in the search for these extreme systems and discuss the prospects for finding more of them in the future.
- Publication:
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AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #14
- Pub Date:
- August 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014HEAD...1411403S