The Einstein@Home Survey for Gamma-ray Pulsars
Abstract
Since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2008, the onboard Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected gamma-ray pulsations from more than 200 pulsars. A large fraction of these remain undetected in radio observations, and could only be found by directly searching the LAT data for pulsations. However, the sensitivity of such ``blind'' searches is limited by the sparse photon data and vast computational requirements. In this contribution we present the latest large-scale blind-search survey for gamma-ray pulsars, which ran on the distributed volunteer computing system, Einstein@Home, and discovered 19 new gamma-ray pulsars. We explain how recent improvements to search techniques and LAT data reconstruction have boosted the sensitivity of blind searches, and present highlights from the survey's discoveries. These include: two glitching pulsars; the youngest known radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsar; and two isolated millisecond pulsars (MSPs), one of which is the only known radio-quiet rotationally powered MSP.
- Publication:
-
Pulsar Astrophysics the Next Fifty Years
- Pub Date:
- August 2018
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S1743921317009231
- Bibcode:
- 2018IAUS..337...21C
- Keywords:
-
- pulsars: general;
- gamma rays: observations