Einstein@Home discovers a record-breaking pulsar-neutron star system

Recently, a new paper about an exciting discovery from our radio pulsar search has been published. In “Einstein@Home Discovery of a Double Neutron Star Binary in the PALFA Survey” we report together with an international team the most massive double neutron star system ever observed.

Read more about this topic in the publication itself, or in our accompanying press release.

Cheers,
Benjamin

Comments

hoarfrost
hoarfrost
Joined: 9 Feb 05
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Hello!Great news! What is

Hello!

Great news! What is the mass of components in this binary system? In abstract I read that total mass of system is ~ 2.875, but after reading a paper source of this numbers is stay unclear... Or I miss anything?

Congratulations!

AgentB
AgentB
Joined: 17 Mar 12
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Great news another really

Great news another really impressive discovery.  Really impressive.

I notice that the companion is not a radio pulsar, but the the publication does not mention any searching in the Fermi data for a gamma ray pulsar.  

Is a radio / gamma ray pulsar pair not possible?

Benjamin Knispel
Benjamin Knispel
Joined: 1 Jun 06
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Hi,hoarfrost wrote:What

Hi,

hoarfrost wrote:
What is the mass of components in this binary system? In abstract I read that total mass of system is ~ 2.875, but after reading a paper source of this numbers is stay unclear...

it is not yet possible to measure the individual masses of the pulsar and its companion. Only the total mass is accessible by measuring the relativistic periastron advance.

It is however possible to set limits on the masses of the pulsar (Mp<1.84 MSun) and the companion (Mc>1.04MSun) from the observed orbital periods.

To measure the individual masses, a different relativistic parameter has to be measured. This could be the relativistic orbital decay or the Einstein delay. The first is the very slow inspiral of the two stars as they emit gravitational waves and their orbits shrink. The latter is the time dilation from the orbital motion of the pulsar. Both might be detectable by the end of this year, as the paper says.

Cheers, Benjamin

 

Einstein@Home Project

Benjamin Knispel
Benjamin Knispel
Joined: 1 Jun 06
Posts: 147
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Hi, AgentB wrote:I notice

Hi,

AgentB wrote:

I notice that the companion is not a radio pulsar, but the the publication does not mention any searching in the Fermi data for a gamma ray pulsar.  

Is a radio / gamma ray pulsar pair not possible?

you can check the Fermi source catalogue, and you will find no point source at the position of the pulsar. This means that there is no gamma-ray counterpart for the companion (nor the pulsar). In principle the companion could be a gamma-ray pulsar, but it would have to be young, and that is somewhat unlikely.

Cheers, Benjamin

 

Einstein@Home Project

AgentB
AgentB
Joined: 17 Mar 12
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Thanks Benjamin. A nice

Thanks Benjamin.

A nice write up here of this discovery and E@H -  Astronomy Magazine  - Amateur astronomers discover a binary pulsar system on crowdsourced technology

fanyutseng
fanyutseng
Joined: 15 Aug 15
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Congratulations!

Congratulations!

thomas mccrea
thomas mccrea
Joined: 1 Sep 12
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Well done congrats

Well done congrats

bk.newton09
bk.newton09
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Fr the past several days my

Fr the past several days my PC has been working on 20 distinct tasks labeled as "Continuous Gravitational Wave search Galactic Center Tuning highFreq v1.01 (AVX) windows_x86_64". On my PC each of these takes a bit over 11 hours to complete. However, all if the tasks end with a notice "Completed, can't validate".

So 20 such tasks and no points added to my total. It does not seem credible for all of these to run to completion and yet not a single one is validated. It appears there is a bug in the set-up somewhere.

My PC has also completed a number of tasks with the label "Gamma-ray pulsar binary search #1 v1.05 (FGRPSSE)
windows_intelx86" and these are validated and result in 693 points being added to my total. So my PC is functioning properly (Core i7 2.66MHZ, 16GB RAM, etc).

Does this strike you as an appropriate situation?

Brian