Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Einstein Home Discoveries of Fermi-LAT Pulsars

Lars Nieder
(On behalf of Einstein@Home and the Fermi-LAT Collaboration)

Abstract:

The Fermi LAT sees more than 200 pulsars in gamma rays. More than a quarter of these have been found by blindly searching the gamma-ray data for pulsations. Such searches are extremely computing intensive, especially for millisecond pulsars and pulsars in binaries. Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project with more than 450,000 volunteers donating their computer's idle time and it has been very successful in performing blind searches, finding 23 isolated gamma-ray pulsars. In the past year, Einstein@Home also began searching for binary gamma-ray pulsars. In my talk, I present highlights from these Fermi pulsar discoveries, including the recent discovery of a radio-quiet millisecond pulsar, and compare these pulsars to the rest of the pulsar population. I discuss our hopes for the next years and why future discoveries might be especially interesting for searches for gravitational waves from neutron stars.