Pulsar Timing for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Abstract

We describe a comprehensive pulsar monitoring campaign for the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the {\em Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope} (formerly GLAST). The detection and study of pulsars in gamma rays give insights into the populations of neutron stars and supernova rates in the Galaxy, into particle acceleration mechanisms in neutron star magnetospheres, and into the "engines" driving pulsar wind nebulae. LAT's unprecedented sensitivity between 20 MeV and 300 GeV together with its 2.4 sr field-of-view makes detection of many gamma-ray pulsars likely, justifying the monitoring of over two hundred pulsars with large spin-down powers. To search for gamma-ray pulsations from most of these pulsars requires a set of phase-connected timing solutions spanning a year or more to properly align the sparse photon arrival times. We describe the choice of pulsars and the instruments involved in the campaign. Attention is paid to verifications of the LAT pulsar software, using for example giant radio pulses from the Crab and from PSR B1937+21 recorded at Nançay, and using X-ray data on PSR J0218+4232 from XMM-Newton. We demonstrate accuracy of the pulsar phase calculations at the microsecond level. Data Table 1 is only available in electronic form at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?J/A+A/ .

13 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

References in corpus (5)

• TeV Gamma-Ray Sources from a Survey of the Galactic Plane with Milagro
• Dispersion Measure Variations and their Effect on Precision Pulsar Timing
• Simultaneous Absolute Timing of the Crab Pulsar at Radio and Optical Wavelengths
• The Geminga Fraction
• Pulsar Physics and GLAST

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fermi Large Area Telescope Bright Gamma-ray Source List
• Fermi LAT Observations of the Vela Pulsar
• Pulsed Gamma-rays from PSR J2021+3651 with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Pulsed Gamma-rays from the millisecond pulsar J0030+0451 with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Mapping the magnetosphere of PSR B1055-52
• Discovery of Pulsations from the Pulsar J0205+6449 in SNR 3C 58 with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
• Pulsar Simulations for the Fermi Large Area Telescope