The youngest millisecond pulsar yet?

by | Nov 20, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries

Title: Fermi Detectiqon of a Luminous γ–ray Pulsar in a Globular Cluster Authors: The Fermi LAT Collaboration Principle Investigator: Dr. Peter Michelson, Stanford UniversityThe Fermi Large Area Telescope, which was launched in 2008, is a gamma ray space telescope which can observe high-energy photons with energies ranging between 20 MeV and 300 GeV. These photons are emitted by particles nearing the speed of light! The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is true to its name, and can observe around 20% of the sky at a time. It scans the sky continuously, observing the entire sky every 3 hours. This all sky gamma-ray survey has already had many exciting results. It observed the GRB 080916C, the most energetic outburst ever seen (see Susanna’s post to learn more about gamma-ray bursts), discovered a link between supernovae remnants and cosmic rays, found out that most of the gamma-ray background does not arise from active galactic nuclei as was previously suspected, and it discovered Fermi bubbles, completely new (or at least previously unseen) substructures emerging from the Galactic center. In addition to all of this, Fermi LAT has proven fantastic tool for the discovery of pulsars.Pulsars form during some type II supernovae events, and are spun up to high rotation speeds by some “kick” due to collapse or explosion asymmetries. They are also highly magnetized, and thus emit periodic synchrotron radiation in two beams. For a more in depth discussion of the observables of pulsars, see this astrobite. The first pulsar discovered, at the heart of the Crab Nebula, was initially observed in radio wavelengths. This was quite a discovery, so much so that...