The identification of the optical companion to the binary millisecond pulsar J0610-2100 in the Galactic field

Abstract

We have used deep V and R images acquired at the ESO Very Large Telescope to identify the optical companion to the binary pulsar PSR J0610-2100, one of the black-widow millisecond pulsars recently detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope in the Galactic plane. We found a faint star (V~26.7) nearly coincident (δr ~0".28) with the pulsar nominal position. This star is visible only in half of the available images, while it disappears in the deepest ones (those acquired under the best seeing conditions), thus indicating that it is variable. Although our observations do not sample the entire orbital period (P=0.28 d) of the pulsar, we found that the optical modulation of the variable star nicely correlates with the pulsar orbital period and describes a well defined peak (R~25.6) at Φ=0.75, suggesting a modulation due to the pulsar heating. We tentatively conclude that the companion to PSR J0610-2100 is a heavily ablated very low mass star (~ 0.02Msun) that completely filled its Roche Lobe.

17 pages, 5 figures - Accepted for pubblication in ApJ

References in corpus (3)

• The Second-Generation Guide Star Catalog: Description and Properties
• The light curve of the companion to PSR B1957+20
• The puzzling properties of the Helium White Dwarf orbiting the millisecond pulsar PSR J1911-5958A in NGC 6752

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