Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar
Submitted on 1 Mar 2011 1:10:47 UTC
A new preprint reports the second Einstein@Home discovery, of a radio pulsar orbiting a white dwarf star once every 9.4 hours. The pulsar, called J1952+2630, is spinning on its axis 48 times per second. It was discovered in data collected at Arecibo Observatory in 2005 by the PALFA Collaboration. The white-dwarf companion star is unusually massive, and weighs at least 95% as much as our sun. This means that J1952+2630 probably belongs to a rare class of intermediate-mass binary pulsars (five were previously known).
The "discovery plots" can be seen near the top of the Einstein@Home (re)detection page.
Congratulations to the two Einstein@Home participants whose computers found J1952+2630 with the highest significance: Dr. Vitaliy V. Shiryaev (Moscow, Russia) and Stacey Eastham (Darwen, UK)! And a big "thank you" to all Einstein@Home volunteers, whose continuing support makes these exciting discoveries possible.
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home
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Comments
Einstein@Home Discovers New Binary Radio Pulsar
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That is excellent news. Congratulations!
RE: That is excellent news.
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Thank you!
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
Congrats to all involved!
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Congrats to all involved!
It is pleasant to see results
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It is pleasant to see results of participation in the project. Congratulations!
Nice! I take it this one took
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Nice! I take it this one took a while to confirm? Or is this a different pulsar from the 'possible second discovery' that was mentioned when the first discovery was announced?
Congratulations!
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Congratulations!
Team Linux Users Everywhere
Nice one
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Nice one Guys.
Congratulations to all that crunch and support this group.
Vaughan
Congratulations! Good news
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Congratulations! Good news for all crunchers!
RE: Nice! I take it this
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This is indeed the second discovery mentioned some time ago. We have previously described it in general terms; now the full story and all details are being provided.
Director, Einstein@Home
Hi! RE: Or is this a
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Hi!
This is indeed the second pulsar mentioned when the first discovery was reported.
The tricky part here is the determination of the orbital parameters for this binary pulsar system. It takes some observations over a longer stretch of time to properly characterize the system; this is why it took a little more time to have the paper ready.
And this hopefully is just the first paper on this nice pulsar! It is a fascinating binary system: it most likely belongs to a class of pulsars, of which only five others are known to date: pulsars in orbit with a massive white dwarf (also called "intermediate-mass binary pulsars"). This means that the companion in the J1952+2630 system most likely is a white dwarf, of which we also know it is has at least 0.95 solar masses. This would be quite a "whopper" for a white dwarf in binary pulsar systems!
The massive companion also means that in the future it might be possible to measure a relativistic effect (the Shapiro delay) in this system. This could allow to precisely determine the individual masses of the companion and the pulsar itself.
Thanks to all crunchers for making this fascinating research possible!
Cheers,
Benjamin
[edit] P.S.: Bruce was a bit faster to reply... :-)
Einstein@Home Project
I am still wondering about
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I am still wondering about the white bars I see in the Arecibo Power Spectrum. But aren't we crunching Parkes data?
Tullio
RE: I am still wondering
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We are, we need to generalize the label underneath the spectrum.
Cheers,
Oliver
Einstein@Home Project
Congratulations, good news
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Congratulations, good news for all of us.
This is a really good
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This is a really good news~Congratulations!
ps. Hope I'll be the next lucky guy :-)
Welcome To Team China!
I reckon it's really cool
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I reckon it's really cool that both E@H assisted pulsar discoveries were for relatively rarer birds in the field, and thus impressively validates the specific assistance given and the whole distributed computing paradigm generally .... :-) :-)
So if my order of magnitudes are correct then this system is two objects of about a Sun's mass each, orbiting over twice per day, at approx. twice the Earth-Moon separation. What's the likely v/c for that?
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
RE: I reckon it's really
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I completely agree. E@H is finding very interesting objects, not "boring" ones!
Mike you can see that from Figure 2 of the preprint. You see that the observed rotational period shift due to the orbital motion is about +- 0.01 msec. The rotational period itself is about 20 msec. The ratio of these is the order-of-magnitude of v/c ~ 0.01/20 = 5 x 10^-4. So the orbital motion is at about 1/1000 the speed of light.
This is only an approximate value, because we can only observe how fast the pulsar is moving back and forth along our line of sight, not how fast it is moving parallel to the line of sight. But if the Shapiro Delay can be measured, as the paper speculates, then we will know everything about the orbit and can figure that out as well.
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: Congratulations to the
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Just a quick question about this, but when you say the participants who found it with the highest significance, approximately how many other members helped to discover this pulsar?
RE: RE: Congratulations
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At the time that we found J1952+2630, the workunits were being shipped out in bundles of 4 dispersion measure values. The entire detection plot, which is referenced in the news items on the front page of E@H, has 628 dispersion measures. Thus, a minimum of 2 x 628/4 = 314 volunteers take part. The factor of 2 is for validation, and 'minimum' is because sometimes the workunits are done by more than 2 volunteers.
Since we recognize pulsars by their pattern over the entire detection plot, ALL of these volunteers directly contributed to the detection.
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: Mike you can see that
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Thank you Bruce. I'd made 0.1% from just a back of envelope simple/circular Newtonian v = sqrt[GM/R]. I gather the measure of the angle of inclination of the plane of the system to our line of sight is taken as zero when 'en face' and not edge-on then. So the 'highly inclined' then hopefully means ( near ) occulting for Shapiro et al. Great! Hey, maybe they'll need some E@H help for that when the data turns up ...... :-):-):-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Hi! As for v/c : The
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Hi!
As for v/c : The velocity of a point on the surface near the equator of that thing due to its rotation would then be more like 1/100 x c, right? wow...
CU
HB
RE: As for v/c : The
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Hi Heinz-Bernd!
The velocity that Mike was asking about was the orbital velocity: the speed at which the neutron star is moving around the white dwarf companion. This is about 1/1000 the speed of light.
The 'spin velocity' or 'rotation velocity' is different: it is the velocity at which a point on the equator of the spinning neutron star is moving. This is given by v = 2 pi f R where f = 48 Hz is the rotation frequency and R = 10 km is the (approximate) radius of the neutron star. This gives almost exactly v = 3 x 10^6 meters/second, which as you say is about 1/100 the speed of light.
Yes, neutron stars are extreme objects! The fastest ones are spinning about 15 times faster than J1952+2630. So on the equator, their spin velocity is more than 1/6 the speed of light!
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: The "discovery plots"
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Has this list already been completed now, and how many re-detections have been taken in anti-center direction? It should be <=31, as this is the number of re-detections since 30. Jul. 2010, the date of starting the files from anti-center direction. The last insertion into this list is dated 7. Dec. 2010. At that date have been 18140 files in progress, but may be all of them has been blanks.
Kind regards
Martin
RE: RE: The "discovery
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The list is not yet complete; some additional post-processing work is needed. I think this will be completed fairly soon.
Director, Einstein@Home
This is great news! I believe
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This is great news! I believe that there are many more unknown pulsars to be found in our galaxy.
Since I have recently returned to this project, I am looking forward to more discoveries! Being involved here makes it all worthwhile! :)
RE: A new preprint reports
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Yes, congratulations! Writing up the data is always a huge amount of work - well done. Here is hoping for more new detections in 2011!
Thank you Bruce, As you
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Thank you Bruce,
As you can tell some of us never give up here.
-Samson-
RE: Thank you Bruce, As you
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Dear Samson,
Thank you! And thank you for not giving up!
You are one of the original and die-hard members of Einstein@Home! I see that you joined the project in January 2005, even before our official public launch on Feb 19, 2005. I just had a look in our database, and of the 3122 E@H volunteers who joined before you, only 248 are still active.
Hang in there!
Cheers,
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: RE: I reckon it's
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I'll agree that's one nice discovery; I'm impressed they picked it up given the DM of over 300 and a S1400 of around 80 microJansky. The talk of binary masses and Shapiro delay made be refer back to my thesis where I measured the Shapiro delay of PSR B1855+09. By comparison, the DM is much lower, and the S1400 (signal power) is like 200 times greater. The 1855+09 companion is only about 0.25 solar mass, so finding a heavy one is intriguing.
Great job everyone!
Marty
"Better is the enemy of the good." - Voltaire (should be memorized by every requirements lead)
RE: RE: Thank you
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Thanks for that info Bruce,
I do wonder once in a while about that and only see a few of them on the message boards when I happen to stop by there.
This was more my type of Boinc project since I first started in 2000 with the Classic Seti and when I found the LHC in 2004 I did as much as available there and that is where I first read about the Einstien project so when I saw that I had to join.
And the only thing that stops me from doing this is when the power goes out here on a rare occasion (winter)
Always good to see you stop by here too.
Thanks again,
-Samson-
I started Einstein on January
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I started Einstein on January 22 2005.
Tullio
I started this project only
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I started this project only in Jan 2008, as soon as I got unlimited Internet connection at my rent flat in Moscow.
Till 2007 I lived in MIPT (Moscow Institute of Phys and Tech, Russia) campus where we still don't have normal unlimited traffic connection (despite it is ok with unlim outside MIPT-campus for about 5-7 years already). It is very sad because more than 2000 private computers are there and a lot of students and postgrad students are interesting in @home projects but paying for mega- and even gigabytes of @home projects traffic is too much for them.
Still in project, Vit
aka Dr. Vitaliy V. Shiryaev (Moscow, Russia)
RE: I started this project
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[For those who are not aware, Vitaliy is the lucky co-discoverer of J1952+2630.]
Dear Vitaliy,
Did your certificates finally arrive in the mail? I hope we got the Russian one right. If you have time, please post a photo of yourself with the certificate.
Cheers,
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
RE: Did your certificates
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Yes, I got:
"to Karin Salatti-Tara date Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 1:28 PM
Dear Karin Salatti-Tara,
I have contacted my local FedEx agency and forwarded this mail to my work address. FedEx delivers weekdays only, so I was at the office when they were knocking to my home door twice this week. I will avoid using pair "home address" and "fedex" next time."
"to Karin Salatti-Tara date Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 5:30 PM
I have just received it! It was very well packed, so we have not an easy job to do at the office at least for the next two weeks: burst all this bubbles of bubble pack. Thank you again from me and my colleagues."
I have some problems(fonts error) with my home computer recent week, but I will post photo you ask soon anyway.