THE FIRST FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE CATALOG OF GAMMA-RAY PULSARS

By A. Abdo, M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, W. Atwood, M. Axelsson, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, M. Baring, D. Bastieri and 207 more. 2009

443 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The dramatic increase in the number of known gamma-ray pulsars since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST) offers the first opportunity to study a sizable population of these high-energy objects. This catalog summarizes 46 high-confidence pulsed detections using the first six months of data taken by the Large Area Telescope (LAT), Fermi's main instrument. Sixteen previously unknown pulsars were discovered by searching for pulsed signals at the positions of bright gamma-ray sources seen with the LAT, or at the positions of objects suspected to be neutron stars based on observations at other wavelengths. The dimmest observed flux among these gamma-ray-selected pulsars is 6.0 × 10−8 ph cm−2 s−1 (for E>100 MeV). Pulsed gamma-ray emission was discovered from 24 known pulsars by using ephemerides (timing solutions) derived from monitoring radio pulsars. Eight of these new gamma-ray pulsars are millisecond pulsars. The dimmest observed flux among the radio-selected pulsars is 1.4 × 10−8 ph cm−2 s−1 (for E>100 MeV). The remaining six gamma-ray pulsars were known since the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory mission, or before. The limiting flux for pulse detection is non-uniform over the sky owing to different background levels, especially near the Galactic plane. The pulsed energy spectra can be described by a power law with an exponential cutoff, with cutoff energies in the range ∼1–5 GeV. The rotational energy-loss rate (Ė) of these neutron stars spans five decades, from ∼3 × 1033 erg s−1 to 5 × 1038 erg s−1, and the apparent efficiencies for conversion to gamma-ray emission range from ∼0.1% to ∼ unity, although distance uncertainties complicate efficiency estimates. The pulse shapes show substantial diversity, but roughly 75% of the gamma-ray pulse profiles have two peaks, separated by ≳0.2 of rotational phase. For most of the pulsars, gamma-ray emission appears to come mainly from the outer magnetosphere, while polar-cap emission remains plausible for a remaining few. Spatial associations imply that many of these pulsars power pulsar wind nebulae. Finally, these discoveries suggest that gamma-ray-selected young pulsars are born at a rate comparable to that of their radio-selected cousins and that the birthrate of all young gamma-ray-detected pulsars is a substantial fraction of the expected Galactic supernova rate.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

THE SECOND FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE CATALOG OF GAMMA-RAY PULSARS (2013, background): “The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope did not just confirm the expectation: by discovering dozens of radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsars and millisecond pulsars (MSPs, thought to be old pulsars spun up to rapid periods via accretion from a companion, Alpar et al. 1982), the”
PRECISE γ-RAY TIMING AND RADIO OBSERVATIONS OF 17 FERMI γ-RAY PULSARS (2010, methodology): “Bridge emission and peak asymmetry appears, and in general, no simple functional form is sufficient to describe the profile (e.g. the Vela pulsar (Abdo et al. 2010e)).”
The Consistency of Fermi-LAT Observations of the Galactic Center with a Millisecond Pulsar Population in the Central Stellar Cluster (2010, background): “5 and exponential cutoff energy Ec at 1-5 GeV, a range consistent with the HG source [5].”
Simultaneous Planck, Swift, and Fermi observations of X-ray and γ-ray selected blazars (2011, methodology): “Significant progress has been made with the publication of a compilation of quasi-simultaneous SEDs of a large sample of γray bright blazars (Abdo et al. 2010a).”
Ab-initio Pulsar Magnetosphere: Particle Acceleration in Oblique Rotators and High-energy Emission Modeling (2017, background): “Our calculations generally reproduce the doublepeaked morphology of gamma-ray pulsars discovered by Fermi (Abdo et al. 2010).”
A population of gamma-ray emitting globular clusters seen with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (2010, methodology): “In addition to the diffuse components, we included all point sources (except for the source that corresponds to the globular cluster of interest) from the first-year catalogue (Abdo et al. 2010b) that were detected with TS ≥ 25 for a given ROI in the background model.”
FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE FIRST SOURCE CATALOG (2010, methodology): “The association between GeV γ-ray PSRs and the PWNs visible in TeV γ-rays seems well established, as has already been discussed in Abdo et al. (2010m).”
SEARCH FOR DARK MATTER SATELLITES USING FERMI-LAT (2012, unknown): “However, since Sourcelike fits each energy bin indepen dently, we expected to find source candidates that were excluded from the 1FGL, either because they had non-power-Iaw spectra or they had hard spectra with too few photons to pass the 1FGL spectral analysis.”
Gamma Ray Signals from Dark Matter: Concepts, Status and Prospects (2012, background): “, so similar conclusions hold for the more commonly encountered case of a power-law with a super-exponential cutoﬀ, i.e. dN/dE ∝ E−γexp[−(E/Ecut)a]: for ’typical’ values of γ and a (roughly 1 .γ,a .2 [258, 259]), but free Ecut, we ﬁnd that such a spectrum is always disfavored w.r.t. a monochromatic ”
Cosmological Fast Radio Bursts from Binary Neutron Star Mergers (2013, background): “Pulsed gamma-ray luminosity of pulsars is typically∼ 10% of spin-down luminosity (Abdo et al. 2010), and msec duration gamma-ray emission from FRBs may be detected by GRB satellites.”
Observing pulsars and fast transients with LOFAR (2011, background): “…is also the case for the pulsars discovered in blind searches of Fermi gamma-ray photons, many of which do not exhibit detectable radio emission (Abdo et al. 2009, 2010b), as well as the remaining unidentified gamma-ray sources, which have characteristics of radio pulsars but which have not yet…”
EIGHT γ-RAY PULSARS DISCOVERED IN BLIND FREQUENCY SEARCHES OF FERMI LAT DATA (2010, methodology): “We applied the time-differencing technique to photons with85 energies above 300 MeV, selected from a 0.8–0.9◦ (see Table 3) circular region of interest (ROI)86 around selected target positions given by the LAT first source catalog (Abdo et al. 2010a).”
FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE FIRST SOURCE CATALOG (2010, methodology): “The association between GeV γ-ray PSRs and the PWNs visible in TeV γ-rays seems well established, as has already been discussed in Abdo et al. (2010m).”