• DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/773/2/91
• Corpus ID: 30094122

The Einstein@Home search for radio pulsars and PSR J2007+2722 discovery

@article{Allen2013TheES,
  title={The Einstein@Home search for radio pulsars and PSR J2007+2722 discovery},
  author={Bruce Allen and Benjamin Knispel and James M. Cordes and Julia S. Deneva and Jason W. T. Hessels and D. P. Anderson and Carsten Aulbert and Oliver Bock and Adam Brazier and Shami Chatterjee and Paul B. Demorest and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein and Henning Fehrmann and Eric V. Gotthelf and David Hammer and Victoria M. Kaspi and Michael Kramer and Andrew G. Lyne and Bernd Machenschalk and Maura Mclaughlin and Chris Messenger and H. J. Pletsch and Scott M. Ransom and Ingrid H. Stairs and Ben W. Stappers and N. D. Ramesh Bhat and Slavko Bogdanov and Fernando Camilo and David J. Champion and Fronefield Crawford and Gregory Desvignes and Paulo C. C. Freire and George Heald and Fredrick A. Jenet and Patrick Lazarus and K J Lee and Joeri van Leeuwen and Ryan S. Lynch and Maria Alessandra Papa and Reinhard Prix and Rachel Rosen and Paul Scholz and Xavier Siemens and Kevin Stovall and Arun Venkataraman and W. W. Zhu},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2013},
  volume={773},
  pages={91}
}

• B. Allen, B. Knispel, +43 authors W. Zhu
• Published 28 February 2013
• Physics
• The Astrophysical Journal

Einstein@Home aggregates the computer power of hundreds of thousands of volunteers from 193 countries, to search for new neutron stars using data from electromagnetic and gravitational-wave detectors. This paper presents a detailed description of the search for new radio pulsars using Pulsar ALFA survey data from the Arecibo Observatory. The enormous computing power allows this search to cover a new region of parameter space; it can detect pulsars in binary systems with orbital periods as short as 11 minutes. We also describe the first Einstein@Home discovery, the 40.8 Hz isolated pulsar PSR J2007+2722, and provide a full timing model. PSR J2007+2722's pulse profile is remarkably wide with emission over almost the entire spin period. This neutron star is most likely a disrupted recycled pulsar, about as old as its characteristic spin-down age of 404 Myr. However, there is a small chance that it was born recently, with a low magnetic field. If so, upper limits on the X-ray flux suggest but cannot prove that PSR J2007+2722 is at least ~100 kyr old. In the future, we expect that the massive computing power provided by volunteers should enable many additional radio pulsar discoveries.