The Einstein@Home Gamma-ray Pulsar Survey. I. Search Methods, Sensitivity and Discovery of New Young Gamma-ray Pulsars

Abstract

We report on the results of a recent blind search survey for gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data being carried out on the distributed volunteer computing system, Einstein@Home. The survey has searched for pulsations in 118 unidentified pulsar-like sources, requiring about 10,000 years of CPU core time. In total, this survey has resulted in the discovery of 17 new gamma-ray pulsars, of which 13 are newly reported in this work, and an accompanying paper. These pulsars are all young, isolated pulsars with characteristic ages between 12 kyr and 2 Myr, and spin-down powers between $10^{34}$ and $4\times 10^{36}$ erg/s. Two of these are the slowest spinning gamma-ray pulsars yet known. One pulsar experienced a very large glitch $\Delta f/f\approx 3.5\times 10^{-6}$ during the Fermi mission. In this, the first of two associated papers, we describe the search scheme used in this survey, and estimate the sensitivity of our search to pulsations in unidentified Fermi-LAT sources. One such estimate results in an upper limit of 57% for the fraction of pulsed emission from the gamma-ray source associated with the Cas A supernova remnant, constraining the pulsed gamma-ray photon flux that can be produced by the neutron star at its center. We also present the results of precise timing analyses for each of the newly detected pulsars.

23 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (20)

• The Third Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars
• An image-based search for pulsars among Fermi unassociated LAT sources
• Extending the Event-weighted Pulsation Search to Very Faint Gamma-ray Sources
• Unidentified Gamma-ray Sources as Targets for Indirect Dark Matter Detection with the Fermi-Large Area Telescope
• The Braking Index of a Radio-quiet Gamma-ray Pulsar
• The Galactic population and properties of young, highly-energetic pulsars
• A millisecond pulsar discovery in a survey of unidentified Fermi $\gamma$-ray sources with LOFAR
• HAWC Detection of a TeV Halo Candidate Surrounding a Radio-quiet pulsar
• The Tail of PSR J0002+6216 and the Supernova Remnant CTB 1
• Discovery, Timing, and Multiwavelength Observations of the Black Widow Millisecond Pulsar PSR J1555-2908
• A Search for TeV Gamma-ray Emission from Pulsar Tails by VERITAS
• Multiwavelength constraints on the unidentified Galactic TeV sources HESS J1427$-$608, HESS J1458$-$608, and new VHE $\gamma$-ray source candidates
• Follow-up of 27 radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsars at 110-190 MHz using the international LOFAR station FR606
• Is the black-widow pulsar PSR J1555-2908 in a hierarchical triple system?
• A Multi-wavelength search for Black Widows and Redbacks counterparts of candidate $\gamma$-ray millisecond pulsars
• Pulsar glitch activity as a state-dependent Poisson process: parameter estimation and epoch prediction
• Measurement of the Gamma-Ray Energy Spectrum beyond 100 TeV from the HESS J1843$-$033 Region
• A search for radio pulsars in five nearby supernova remnants
• New upper limits on low-frequency radio emission from isolated neutron stars with LOFAR
• XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of the unidentified Fermi-LAT source 3FGL J1016.5-6034: A Young Pulsar with a Nebula?