Gaia pulsars and where to find them

Abstract

While the majority of massive stars have a stellar companion, most pulsars appear to be isolated. Taken at face value, this suggests that most massive binaries break apart due to strong natal kicks received in supernova explosions. However, the observed binary fraction can still be subject to strong selection effects, as monitoring of newly discovered pulsars is rarely carried out for long enough to conclusively rule out multiplicity. Here, we use the second Gaia Data Release (DR2) to search for companions to 1534 rotation-powered pulsars with positions known to better than 0.5 arcseconds. We find 22 matches to known pulsars, including one not reported elsewhere, and 8 new possible companions to young pulsars. We examine the photometric and kinematic properties of these systems and provide empirical relations for identifying Gaia sources with potential millisecond pulsar companions. Our results confirm that the observed multiplicity fraction is small. However, we show that the number of binaries below the sensitivity of Gaia and radio timing in our sample could still be significantly higher. We constrain the binary fraction of young pulsars to be $f_{\mathrm{young}}^{\mathrm{true}}\le 5.3(8.3)\%$ under realistic(conservative) assumptions for the binary properties and current sensitivity thresholds. For massive stars ($\ge 10$ M${}_{\odot }$) in particular, we find $f_{\mathrm{OB}}^{\mathrm{true}}\le 3.7\%$ which sets a firm independent upper limit on the galactic neutron-star merger rate, $\le 7.2\times 10^{-4}$ yr${}^{-1}$. Ongoing and future projects such as the CHIME/pulsar program, MeerTime, HIRAX and ultimately the SKA, will significantly improve these constraints in the future.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS; comments are welcome

References in corpus (28)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• The Gaia mission
• A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
• Binary interaction dominates the evolution of massive stars
• The ATNF Pulsar Catalogue
• Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems
• An eclipsing binary distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud accurate to 2 per cent
• The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey: VI. Discovery and timing of 142 pulsars and a Galactic population analysis
• Precise Gamma-Ray Timing and Radio Observations of 17 Fermi Gamma-Ray Pulsars
• Formation of millisecond pulsars with CO white dwarf companions - II. Accretion, spin-up, true ages and comparison to MSPs with He white dwarf companions
• On the birthrates of Galactic neutron stars
• The MeerKAT Telescope as a Pulsar Facility: System verification and early science results from MeerTime
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. II. Performance of Bayesian distance estimators on a Gaia-like catalogue
• The relativistic pulsar-white dwarf binary PSR J1738+0333 I. Mass determination and evolutionary history
• Optical spectroscopy and demographics of redback millisecond pulsar binaries
• Discovery of 14 radio pulsars in a survey of the Magellanic Clouds
• Gaia Data Release 2 Catalogue of Extremely-low Mass White Dwarf Candidates
• The light curve of the companion to PSR B1957+20
• Asymmetric mass ratios for bright double neutron-star mergers
• The Thousand-Pulsar-Array programme on MeerKAT I: Science objectives and first results
• Discovery and timing of the first 8gr8 Cygnus survey pulsars
• Optical/infrared observations unveiling the formation, nature and evolution of High-Mass X-ray Binaries
• Faraday rotation measures of northern-hemisphere pulsars using CHIME/Pulsar
• Wide binary companions to massive stars and their use in constraining natal kicks
• An Updated Galactic Double Neutron Star Merger Rate Based on Radio Pulsar Populations
• Optical Detection of Two Intermediate Mass Binary Pulsar Companions
• Gravitational Microlensing by Neutron Stars and Radio Pulsars: Event Rates, Timescale Distributions, and Mass Measurements

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Gaia pulsars and where to find them in EDR3