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Millisecond Pulsar Surveys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2017

D. C. Backer
D. C. Backer*
Affiliation:
Astronomy Department and Radio Astronomy Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

Abstract

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In 1982 a new class of pulsars was defined by the discovery of a star with a millisecond rotation period, 1.6 ms. In the past 3.5 years two additional pulsars with millisecond periods have been discovered. The rapid spin of these pulsars is attributed to mass transfer in a low-mass binary progenitor system. This hypothesis is supported by the presence of companions in two of the three millisecond pulsars. These recent discoveries have led both to a deeper understanding of the final stages of stellar evolution in binary systems, and to closer ties between the observational study of neutron stars by radio, optical and X-ray techniques. In addition the millisecond pulsars provide precise astrophysical clocks that can be used to improve the solar-system ephemeredes and to search for a background of gravitational waves that may have been produced in the early stages of the visible universe. Old and ongoing searches for new millisecond pulsars are described in this paper.

Type
I. Rotation-Powered Pulsars
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 125: The Origin and Evolution of Neutron Stars , 1987 , pp. 13 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1987 

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