Pulsar searches of Fermi unassociated sources with the Effelsberg telescope

Abstract

Using the 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope operating at 1.36 GHz, we have performed a targeted radio pulsar survey of 289 unassociated γ-ray sources discovered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the Fermi satellite and published in the 1FGL catalogue (Abdo et al. 2010a). This survey resulted in the discovery of millisecond pulsar J1745+1017, which resides in a short-period binary system with a low-mass companion, |$M_{c,\text{min}} \sim 0.0137\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot }$|⁠, indicative of ‘black widow’ type systems. A 2-yr timing campaign has produced a refined radio ephemeris, accurate enough to allow for phase-folding of the LAT photons, resulting in the detection of a dual-peaked γ-ray light curve, proving that PSR J1745+1017 is the source responsible for the γ-ray emission seen in 1FGL J1745.5+1018 (2FGL J1745.6+1015; Nolan et al. 2012). We find the γ-ray spectrum of PSR J1745+1017 to be well modelled by an exponentially cut-off power law with cut-off energy 3.2 GeV and photon index 1.6. The observed sources are known to contain a further 10 newly discovered pulsars which were undetected in this survey. Our radio observations of these sources are discussed and in all cases limiting flux densities are calculated. The reasons behind the seemingly low yield of discoveries are also discussed.