Discovery of 13 new gamma-ray pulsars by Einstein@Home volunteers

Wow ! Congrats to all ! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

So nice to see scientific results from this distributed computing effort.
Congrats to all who participate(d)!

Yeah. It's a cumulative graph. You have to stare at it for a bit to realise that E@H has found about 1 in 3 of all known gamma pulsars thus far.

On the upside the plots have made me realise another point ( admittedly an obvious DOH ! ) that the emission is not well collimated in phase/angle. I say that because one is introduced to the topic of pulsars with the rotating light-house beam idea, but the spray is quite wide really and would be quite poor if a terrestrial light-house did that. For most there is easily one third of the cycle emitting above baseline. Now that's a neighbourhood that really fizzles !

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) The other thing that strikes me is the integration times : is that of order ~1500 -> 2000 days ? And still we pick up the pattern from so few gammas with respect to all those rotations. That is the supercomputer that E@H is ! :-)

( late edit ) I note our institutional colleagues helping out. Of particular attention I point to LLO_LDAS, involved in two discoveries ( late 2014 analysis ) , a cluster of 1300 AMD Quad core Opterons running 64 bit Linux ( ? Redhat-ish ). That's gotta be from Livingston LIGO ie. LIGO Data Analysis System.

If I understood right (by numbers on vertical axis), this graph - cumulative for all pulsars founded in project - radio and gamma. But in header - "Timeline of gamma-ray pulsars ...".

Congratulations!!!

Wow and stuff!

A think a "Snoopy dance" is called-for and completely excusable.

This continues to prove that this DC project is neither wasting our time or our money.

Congratulations again to those who made a real. brand new, discovery!

And this is unclear.
Graph with more detailed caption and separate areas for Einstein@Home search and non-@Home - may by clearer.

Well done guys :-)

This plot is counting gamma-ray-pulsar discoveries only from blind searches in Fermi/LAT data. More gamma ray pulsars (= pulsars showing pulsed gamma ray emissions) were found by looking at known radio pulsars (and then you know the period and period derivative(s) already to high precision!) and then also detecting pulsed gamma ray emissions from that source (with the same period).

Blind searches like the ones on E@H are much harder:

- you take a suspect source, e.g. from the Fermi source catalog (so in this case you know something is emitting gamma rays, and you might even tell from the collected data that it looks like a neutron star), but the sources have comparatively uncertain sky positions (the angular resolution of Fermi/LAT is not spectacular).

- then you have to guess the real sky position and spin period and period derivatives to a high precision and check for a signal in the data.

- for sources in binary systems, you also have to guess the right orbital parameters of the system, making the problem even more computationally challenging. This is what our latest Fermi search on E@H is doing

Thanks HB, i was thinking about this a little over the last few days.

When blind searching - do we use at all the data since 2008 when Fermi was launched?

I guess for the new ones there are "maybe, if we had a few more data points..." , if so, do we have plans to follow-up on them as new data arrives?

Looking at the pulse profiles - they are so many different shapes, no two the same. Is this variety typical a) for GRPs? and b) our common garden radio pulsars?

There is a publication that focuses on one of the discovered pulsars which has lots of interesting info in it: PSR J1906+0722: An Elusive Gamma-Ray Pulsar. Chapter 2.1 has this to say: "In the blind search we analyzed Fermi -LAT data recorded between 2008 August 4 and 2014 April 6. "

I'm a scientific software engineers, not a physicist, so there will be other people around here who are more qualified to answer these questions. But FWIW, the Fermi satellite and the LAT instrument could theoretically, AFAIK, keep working for years to come, its only limiting consumable seems to be the attention of people responsible for funding ;-) (and every discovery made with Fermi data might help to prolong its life, or increase the chances for a successor mission). As long as new data is pouring in, scientists will, IMHO, always try to look again at "weak" candidates from previous searches.