• DOI:10.1088/2041-8205/779/1/L11
• Corpus ID: 53588282

Einstein@Home discovery of four young gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi LAT data

@article{Pletsch2013EinsteinHomeDO,
  title={Einstein@Home discovery of four young gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi LAT data},
  author={H. J. Pletsch and Lucas Guillemot and Bruce Allen and David P. Anderson and Carsten Aulbert and Oliver Bock and David J. Champion and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein and Henning Fehrmann and David Hammer and Ramesh Karuppusamy and Michael J. Keith and Michael Kramer and Bernd Machenschalk and Cherry Ng and Maria Alessandra Papa and Paul S. Ray and Xavier Siemens},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2013},
  volume={779}
}

• H. Pletsch, L. Guillemot, +15 authors X. Siemens
• Published 25 November 2013
• Physics
• The Astrophysical Journal

We report the discovery of four gamma-ray pulsars, detected in computing-intensive blind searches of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The pulsars were found using a novel search approach, combining volunteer distributed computing via Einstein@Home and methods originally developed in gravitational-wave astronomy. The pulsars PSRs J0554+3107, J1422–6138, J1522–5735, and J1932+1916 are young and energetic, with characteristic ages between 35 and 56 kyr and spin-down powers in the range 6 × 1034—1036 erg s–1. They are located in the Galactic plane and have rotation rates of less than 10 Hz, among which the 2.1 Hz spin frequency of PSR J0554+3107 is the slowest of any known gamma-ray pulsar. For two of the new pulsars, we find supernova remnants coincident on the sky and discuss the plausibility of such associations. Deep radio follow-up observations found no pulsations, suggesting that all four pulsars are radio-quiet as viewed from Earth. These discoveries, the first gamma-ray pulsars found by volunteer computing, motivate continued blind pulsar searches of the many other unidentified LAT gamma-ray sources.