Abstract
Abstract The Low-Frequency Array radio telescope discovered the 707 Hz binary millisecond pulsar (MSP) J0952−0607 in a targeted radio pulsation search of an unidentified Fermi gamma-ray source. This source shows a weak energy flux of F γ = 2.6 × 10−12 erg cm−2 s−1 in the energy range between 100 MeV and 100 GeV. Here we report the detection of pulsed gamma-ray emission from PSR J0952−0607 in a very sensitive gamma-ray pulsation search. The pulsar’s rotational, binary, and astrometric properties are measured over 7 years of Fermi-Large Area Telescope data. For this we take into account the uncertainty on the shape of the gamma-ray pulse profile. We present an updated radio-timing solution now spanning more than 2 years and show results from optical modeling of the black-widow-type companion based on new multiband photometric data taken with HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma and ULTRACAM on the New Technology Telescope at ESO La Silla (based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory, Chile; programme 0101.D-0925, PI: Clark, C. J.). PSR J0952−0607 is now the fastest-spinning pulsar for which the intrinsic spin-down rate has been reliably constrained ( ). The inferred surface magnetic field strength of is among the 10 lowest of all known pulsars. This discovery is another example of an extremely fast spinning black-widow pulsar hiding within an unidentified Fermi gamma-ray source. In the future such systems might help to pin down the maximum spin frequency and the minimum surface magnetic field strength of MSPs.
Highlights
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Atwood et al 2009) has proven itself to be a powerful instrument in gamma-ray pulsar astronomy
We present an updated radio-timing solution spanning more than two years and show results from optical modeling of the black-widow-type companion based on new multi-band photometric data taken with HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma and ULTRACAM on the New Technology Telescope at ESO La Sillaa)
After extending our data set to cover the extra year of data as explained in Section 2.1, and without using a weight cut, we found that the H statistic value increased to H = 102.9 without further refinement
Summary
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Atwood et al 2009) has proven itself to be a powerful instrument in gamma-ray pulsar astronomy. LAT data are used to identify promising pulsar candidates for deep, targeted radio searches and find gamma-ray pulsations in blind or follow-up searches (for a review see, e.g., Caraveo 2014). Radio pulsar searches targeting the sky positions of LAT sources have been very successful in finding isolated and binary millisecond pulsars (MSPs; e.g., Ray et al 2012). For most gamma-ray pulsars, curved spectra are preferred with > 95% confidence (e.g., Abdo et al 2013). In the Fermi LAT Third Source Catalog (3FGL; Acero et al 2015), only 2 out of 136 pulsars had variability indices corresponding to significant variability above the 99% confidence level. We note that the transitional MSPs (for a review see, e.g., Jaodand et al 2018) are an important exception, with significant changes in gamma-ray flux associated with transitions between accretion- and rotation-powered states (Stappers et al 2014; Johnson et al 2015)
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