Discovery, Timing, and Multiwavelength Observations of the Black Widow Millisecond Pulsar PSR J1555-2908

Abstract

We report the discovery of PSR J1555-2908, a 1.79 ms radio and gamma-ray pulsar in a 5.6 hr binary system with a minimum companion mass of 0.052 $M_{\odot }$. This fast and energetic ($\dot{E}=3\times 10^{35}$ erg/s) millisecond pulsar was first detected as a gamma-ray point source in Fermi LAT sky survey observations. Guided by a steep spectrum radio point source in the Fermi error region, we performed a search at 820 MHz with the Green Bank Telescope that first discovered the pulsations. The initial radio pulse timing observations provided enough information to seed a search for gamma-ray pulsations in the LAT data, from which we derive a timing solution valid for the full Fermi mission. In addition to the radio and gamma-ray pulsation discovery and timing, we searched for X-ray pulsations using NICER but no significant pulsations were detected. We also obtained time-series r-band photometry that indicates strong heating of the companion star by the pulsar wind. Material blown off the heated companion eclipses the 820 MHz radio pulse during inferior conjunction of the companion for ~10% of the orbit, which is twice the angle subtended by its Roche lobe in an edge-on system.

15 pages, 6 figures, accepted by ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• The Third Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars
• The TRAPUM L-band survey for pulsars in Fermi-LAT gamma-ray sources
• A New Flaring Black Widow Candidate and Demographics of Black Widow Millisecond Pulsars in the Galactic Field
• Neutron star mass estimates from gamma-ray eclipses in spider millisecond pulsar binaries
• A black widow population dissection through HiPERCAM multi-band light curve modelling
• Internal heating mechanisms in neutron stars
• Green Bank Telescope Discovery of the Redback Binary Millisecond Pulsar PSR J0212+5321
• Optical Light Curve of 4FGL J0935.3+0901: A Flaring Black Widow Candidate
• Discovery and Timing of Millisecond Pulsars with the Arecibo 327 MHz Drift-Scan Survey
• Is the black-widow pulsar PSR J1555-2908 in a hierarchical triple system?
• A census of galactic spider binary millisecond pulsars with the Nançay Radio Telescope