Pulsars Everywhere! A Galactic EGRET Source Retrospective

At the end of the EGRET mission, the only firmly identified sources of GeV emission in our Galaxy were a handful of young pulsars and a solar flare. With the recent launch of AGILE and the imminent launch of GLAST, the sources that EGRET saw will again be studied in γ-rays. We review the multiwavelength observations of the error boxes of Galactic EGRET sources to see what types of sources this new generation of γ-ray telescopes will be studying. I note that most, if not all, of the sources seem to be related to pulsars. Several are probably radio pulsars not known during the time of EGRET. Others are radio-quiet pulsars like Geminga. Still others are probably the product of a pulsar wind interacting with a dense environment. The rest seem to be coincident with things associated with the birth of pulsars i.e. supernova remnants, molecular clouds, and massive star associations.