Abstract
We review the main properties, demographics and applications of binary and millisecond radio pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years, mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the known pulsar population to over 1800. There are now 83 binary and millisecond pulsars associated with the disk of our Galaxy, and a further 140 pulsars in 26 of the Galactic globular clusters. Recent highlights include the discovery of the young relativistic binary system PSR J1906+0746, a rejuvination in globular cluster pulsar research including growing numbers of pulsars with masses in excess of 1.5 M⊙, a precise measurement of relativistic spin precession in the double pulsar system and a Galactic millisecond pulsar in an eccentric (e = 0.44) orbit around an unevolved companion.Electronic Supplementary MaterialSupplementary material is available for this article at 10.12942/lrr-2008-8.
Highlights
Living Reviews in Relativity is a peer reviewed open access journal published by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Am Muhlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
While the hunt for more rapidly rotating pulsars and even “sub-millisecond pulsars” continues, and most neutron star equations of state allow higher spin rates than 716 Hz, it has been suggested [38] that the dearth of pulsars with P < 1.5 ms is caused by gravitational wave emission from Rossby-mode instabilities [5]
Pulsars at high latitudes are especially important for the millisecond pulsar timing array (Section 4.7.3) which benefits from widely separated pulsars on the sky to search for correlations in the cosmic gravitational wave background on a variety of angular scales
Summary
Pulsars – rapidly rotating highly magnetised neutron stars – have many applications in physics and astronomy.
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