An automated and interactive tool for gamma-ray pulsar monitoring and glitch detection

Abstract

The Fermi Large Area Telescope is enabling a revolution in pulsar physics, having detected more than 300 gamma-ray pulsars. Fermi-LAT pulsars are typically highly energetic, and hence they are very likely to show glitches. Moreover, a significant fraction of Fermi-LAT pulsars are not detected by radio telescopes. Among radio-quiet pulsars there's the peculiar example of PSR J2021+4026, which is variable on a time scale of a few years. Hence, a monitoring infrastructure is required in order to systematically study the timing evolution of gamma-ray pulsars. For this purpose we are developing GLIMPSE, an analysis pipeline for Fermi-LAT pulsars, based on Python and on the official Fermitools. This pipeline periodically runs data reduction and periodicity tests for each gamma-ray pulsar in the catalog, then performs a glitch search with different approaches. The computational time is reduced thanks to an optimized usage of memory, which renders the tool suitable for a systematic timing analysis of Fermi pulsars. Moreover, a web application allows users to visualize the results and to interactively manage analysis setups. Here we present a preview of the infrastructure, and we discuss future applications in the multi-messenger framework, focusing on searches for gravitational waves from pulsars.