NASA's Fermi finds youngest millisecond pulsar, 100 pulsars to-date

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form.

At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits electromagnetic energy at periodic intervals. A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. This matter is so compressed that even a teaspoonful weighs as much as Mount Everest.

"With this new batch of pulsars, Fermi now has detected more than 100, which is an exciting milestone when you consider that, before Fermi's launch in 2008, only seven of them were known to emit gamma rays," said Pablo Saz Parkinson, an astrophysicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a co-author on two papers detailing the findings.

One group of pulsars combines incredible density with extreme rotation. The fastest of these so-called millisecond pulsars whirls at 43,000 revolutions per minute.

Millisecond pulsars are thought to achieve such speeds because they are gravitationally bound in binary systems with normal stars. During part of their stellar lives, gas flows from the normal star to the pulsar. Over time, the impact of this falling gas gradually spins up the pulsar's rotation.

The strong magnetic fields and rapid rotation of pulsars cause them to emit powerful beams of energy, from radio waves to gamma rays. Because the star is transferring rotational energy to the pulsar, the pulsar's spin eventually slows as the star loses matter.

Typically, millisecond pulsars are around a billion years old. However, in the Nov. 3 issue of Science, the Fermi team reveals a bright, energetic millisecond pulsar only 25 million years old.

The object, named PSR J1823-3021A, lies within NGC 6624, a spherical collection of ancient stars called a globular cluster, one of about 160 similar objects that orbit our galaxy. The cluster is about 10 billion years old and lies about 27,000 light-years away toward the constellation Sagittarius.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) showed that eleven globular clusters emit gamma rays, the cumulative emission of dozens of millisecond pulsars too faint for even Fermi to detect individually. But that's not the case for NGC 6624.

"It's amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object. It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it's emitting energy. It's a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home," said Paulo Freire, the study's lead author, at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

J1823-3021A was previously identified as a pulsar by its radio emission, yet of the nine new pulsars, none are millisecond pulsars, and only one was later found to emit radio waves.

Despite its sensitivity, Fermi's LAT may detect only one gamma ray for every 100,000 rotations of some of these faint pulsars. Yet new analysis techniques applied to the precise position and arrival time of photons collected by the LAT since 2008 were able to identify them.

"We adapted methods originally devised for studying gravitational waves to the problem of finding gamma-ray pulsars, and we were quickly rewarded," said Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Allen co-authored a paper on the discoveries that was published online in The Astrophysical Journal.

Allen also directs the Einstein@Home project, a distributed computing effort that uses downtime on computers of volunteers to process astronomical data. In July, the project extended the search for gamma-ray pulsars to the general public by including Femi LAT data in the work processed by Einstein@Home users.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

For more information, images and animations, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

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NASA's Fermi finds youngest millisecond pulsar, 100 pulsars to-date

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form.

At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits electromagnetic energy at periodic intervals. A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. This matter is so compressed that even a teaspoonful weighs as much as Mount Everest.

"With this new batch of pulsars, Fermi now has detected more than 100, which is an exciting milestone when you consider that, before Fermi's launch in 2008, only seven of them were known to emit gamma rays," said Pablo Saz Parkinson, an astrophysicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a co-author on two papers detailing the findings.

One group of pulsars combines incredible density with extreme rotation. The fastest of these so-called millisecond pulsars whirls at 43,000 revolutions per minute.

Millisecond pulsars are thought to achieve such speeds because they are gravitationally bound in binary systems with normal stars. During part of their stellar lives, gas flows from the normal star to the pulsar. Over time, the impact of this falling gas gradually spins up the pulsar's rotation.

The strong magnetic fields and rapid rotation of pulsars cause them to emit powerful beams of energy, from radio waves to gamma rays. Because the star is transferring rotational energy to the pulsar, the pulsar's spin eventually slows as the star loses matter.

Typically, millisecond pulsars are around a billion years old. However, in the Nov. 3 issue of Science, the Fermi team reveals a bright, energetic millisecond pulsar only 25 million years old.

The object, named PSR J1823-3021A, lies within NGC 6624, a spherical collection of ancient stars called a globular cluster, one of about 160 similar objects that orbit our galaxy. The cluster is about 10 billion years old and lies about 27,000 light-years away toward the constellation Sagittarius.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) showed that eleven globular clusters emit gamma rays, the cumulative emission of dozens of millisecond pulsars too faint for even Fermi to detect individually. But that's not the case for NGC 6624.

"It's amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object. It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it's emitting energy. It's a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home," said Paulo Freire, the study's lead author, at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

J1823-3021A was previously identified as a pulsar by its radio emission, yet of the nine new pulsars, none are millisecond pulsars, and only one was later found to emit radio waves.

Despite its sensitivity, Fermi's LAT may detect only one gamma ray for every 100,000 rotations of some of these faint pulsars. Yet new analysis techniques applied to the precise position and arrival time of photons collected by the LAT since 2008 were able to identify them.

"We adapted methods originally devised for studying gravitational waves to the problem of finding gamma-ray pulsars, and we were quickly rewarded," said Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Allen co-authored a paper on the discoveries that was published online in The Astrophysical Journal.

Allen also directs the Einstein@Home project, a distributed computing effort that uses downtime on computers of volunteers to process astronomical data. In July, the project extended the search for gamma-ray pulsars to the general public by including Femi LAT data in the work processed by Einstein@Home users.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

For more information, images and animations, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

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Crab pulsar beams most energetic gamma rays ever detected from a pulsar

ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2011) — Astrophysicists have detected pulsed gamma-ray emission from the Crab pulsar at energies far beyond what current theoretical models of pulsars can explain.

With energies exceeding 100 billion electron-volts (100 GeV), the surprising gamma-ray pulses were detected by the VERITAS telescope array at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona and reported by an international team of scientists in a paper in the October 7 issue of Science. Corresponding author Nepomuk Otte, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that some researchers had told him he was crazy to even look for pulsar emission in this energy realm.

"It turns out that being persistent and stubborn helps," Otte said. "These results put new constraints on the mechanism for how the gamma-ray emission is generated."

Otte, Andrew McCann of McGill University in Montreal, and Martin Schroedter of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory performed most of the analytic work for the study, which involved nearly 100 scientists in the VERITAS collaboration. VERITAS spokesperson Rene Ong, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, credited Otte as the leading advocate for using the powerful gamma-ray observatory to study the Crab pulsar.

"To me it's a real triumph of the experimental approach, not going along with the flow and making assumptions, but just observing to see what there is. And lo and behold, we see something different than what everybody expected," Ong said.

The Crab pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded in a spectacular supernova in the year 1054, leaving behind the brilliant Crab Nebula, with the pulsar at its heart. It is one of the most intensively studied objects in the sky. Rotating about 30 times a second, the pulsar has an intense, co-rotating magnetic field from which it emits beams of radiation. The beams sweep around like a lighthouse beacon because they are not aligned with the star's rotation axis. So although the beams are steady, they are detected on Earth as rapid pulses of radiation.

Scientists have long agreed on a general picture of what causes pulsar emission. Electromagnetic forces created by the star's rapidly rotating magnetic field accelerate charged particles to near the speed of light, producing radiation over a broad spectrum. But the details remain a mystery.

"After many years of observations and results from the Crab, we thought we had an understanding of how it worked, and the models predicted an exponential decay of the emission spectrum above around 10 GeV. So it came as a real surprise when we found pulsed gamma-ray emission at energies above 100 GeV," said coauthor David Williams, adjunct professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the VERITAS collaboration.

Prior to these new results, a phenomenon known as curvature radiation was the leading explanation for the Crab's pulsed gamma-ray emission. Curvature radiation is produced when a high-energy charged particle moves along a curved magnetic field. But according to Otte, this mechanism cannot account for gamma rays with energies above 100 GeV.

"The conventional wisdom was that the dominant mechanism is curvature radiation. But the VERITAS results have shown that there must be a different mechanism at work," Otte said. "Curvature radiation can explain the lower-energy emission, but we really don't know what causes the very high-energy emission."

One possible scenario may be a process known as inverse Compton scattering, which involves energy transfer from charged particles to photons. "That seems to be a more likely scenario now, but we still don't know the details of how this works," Otte said. It is also not clear whether one mechanism dominates at all gamma-ray energies, or if curvature radiation dominates at lower energies and something like inverse Compton scattering dominates at higher energies.

According to Ong, researchers will need to characterize the very high-energy gamma-ray emission in much greater detail in order to gain more insight into the mechanisms behind it. "We need to take more measurements and get the exact shape of the spectrum at these very high energies," he said.

The VERITAS observations open up a new avenue for testing Einstein's theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a universal constant. One of the predictions of a quantum theory of gravity, which emerges from efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, is that the speed of light actually may have a small dependence on the energy of the photon. This would be a violation of "Lorentz invariance," which is at the core of special relativity, but it might be detectable in the VERITAS data, Otte said. Photons with a range of energies are emitted by the pulsar at the same time. If photons with different energies travel at different speeds, the effect would manifest itself as a slight shift in the position of the pulses at different energies.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz. The original article was written by Tim Stephens.

Journal Reference:

The VERITAS Collaboration et al. Detection of Pulsed Gamma Rays Above 100 GeV from the Crab Pulsar. Science, October 7, 2011 DOI: 10.1126/science.1208192

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