Home   The group   Research   Projects   Technology   Recent results   Links


Fundamental Physics in
Radio Astronomy
MPIfR






New millisecond pulsar found with the Effelsberg Telescope!


Picture displaying new MSP discovered with the Effelsberg telescope

Figure 1: Discovery plot of PSR J1745+10. The observation was taken on 2010 January 17. The pulsar has a narrow pulse, is persistent (left) and its broadband signal is dispersed (center). Figure produced by Ewan Barr using the PRESTO software (S. Ransom).

Recently we have started our pulsar surveys with the Effelsberg Telescope. One of them (the major effort) will be a blind all-sky survey, being done in coordination with the Parkes telescope. The other survey, which is more of a priority at the present time, is searching for pulsars in unidentified Fermi sources. These are objects with significant amounts of gamma-ray emission, as detected by the Fermi satellite, that have no known counterpart. Many of these might be still undiscovered pulsars.

As a part of this survey, we have just discovered one new pulsar, PSR J1740+10. It has a spin period of 2.65 ms and it is a "black widow" binary, meaning that we believe the pulsar is ablating its white dwarf companion, which by now has a very small mass (for a star): 20 times Jupiter's! PSR J1745+10 has an orbital period of 17.5 hours - the longest known for this kind of system!

We are now timing this system as precisely as possible. If its orbit is stable enough this pulsar might be useful for the detection of gravitational waves. Regardless, this discovery indicates that we can find new pulsars with the Effelsberg telescope. This suggests that the upcoming surveys with the Effelsberg telescope might be quite fruitful!

See the German press release here.