Twenty Years of Searching for (and Finding) Globular Cluster Pulsars

Abstract

Globular clusters produce orders of magnitude more millisecond pulsars per unit mass than the Galactic disk. Since the first cluster pulsar was uncovered twenty years ago, at least 138 have been identified - most of which are binary millisecond pulsars. Because of their origins involving stellar encounters, many of these systems are exotic objects that would never be observed in the Galactic disk. Examples include pulsar-main sequence binaries, extremely rapid rotators (including the current record holder), and millisecond pulsars in highly eccentric orbits. These systems are allowing new probes of the interstellar medium, the equation of state of material at supra-nuclear density, the mass distribution of neutron stars, and the dynamics of globular clusters.

9 pages, 6 figures. Submitted review for the "40 Years of Pulsars" conference in Montreal, Aug 2007. To be published by the AIP

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• TRAPUM discovery of thirteen new pulsars in NGC 1851 using MeerKAT
• Searching for pulsars associated with polarised point sources using LOFAR: Initial discoveries from the TULIPP project
• A New Pulsar in Green Bank Telescope Searches of Ten Globular Clusters
• A Fermi-LAT Study of Globular Cluster Dynamical Evolution in the Milky Way: Millisecond Pulsars as the Probe