Einstein@Home discovers a radio-quiet gamma-ray millisecond pulsar

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https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/2/eaao7228

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10.1126/sciadv.aao7228
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/19538

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UMBC Physics Department
UMBC Center for Space Sciences and Technology (CSST) / Center for Research and Exploration in Space Sciences & Technology II (CRSST II)
UMBC Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET)

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2018-02-28

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journal articles
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Citation of Original Publication

Colin J. Clark et al., Einstein@Home discovers a radio-quiet gamma-ray millisecond pulsar, Science Advances, Vol. 4, no. 2, eaao7228 (2018), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao7228

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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law

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Abstract

Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are old neutron stars that spin hundreds of times per second and appear to pulsate as their emission beams cross our line of sight. To date, radio pulsations have been detected from all rotation-powered MSPs. In an attempt to discover radio-quiet gamma-ray MSPs, we used the aggregated power from the computers of tens of thousands of volunteers participating in the Einstein@Home distributed computing project to search for pulsations from unidentified gamma-ray sources in Fermi Large Area Telescope data. This survey discovered two isolated MSPs, one of which is the only known rotation-powered MSP to remain undetected in radio observations. These gamma-ray MSPs were discovered in completely blind searches without prior constraints from other observations, raising hopes for detecting MSPs from a predicted Galactic bulge population.