No Arabic abstract
We searched for radio pulsars in 25 of the non-variable, unassociated sources in the Fermi LAT Bright Source List with the Green Bank Telescope at 820 MHz. We report the discovery of three radio and gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from a high Galactic latitude subset of these sources. All of the pulsars are in binary systems, which would have made them virtually impossible to detect in blind gamma-ray pulsation searches. They seem to be relatively normal, nearby (<=2 kpc) millisecond pulsars. These observations, in combination with the Fermi detection of gamma-rays from other known radio MSPs, imply that most, if not all, radio MSPs are efficient gamma-ray producers. The gamma-ray spectra of the pulsars are power-law in nature with exponential cutoffs at a few GeV, as has been found with most other pulsars. The MSPs have all been detected as X-ray point sources. Their soft X-ray luminosities of ~10^{30-31} erg/s are typical of the rare radio MSPs seen in X-rays.
We present timing solutions for eight binary millisecond pulsars (MSPs) discovered by searching unidentified Fermi-LAT source positions with the 327 MHz receiver of the Arecibo 305-m radio telescope. Five of the pulsars are spiders with orbital periods shorter than 8.1 h. Three of these are in black widow systems (with degenerate companions of 0.02-0.03 solar masses), one is in a redback system (with a non-degenerate companion of $gtrsim 0.3$ solar masses), and one (J1908+2105) is an apparent middle-ground case between the two observational classes. The remaining three pulsars have white dwarf companions and longer orbital periods. With the initially derived radio timing solutions, we detected gamma-ray pulsations from all MSPs and extended the timing solutions using photons from the full Fermi mission, thus confirming the identification of these MSPs with the Fermi-LAT sources. The radio emission of the redback is eclipsed during 50% of its orbital period, which is typical for this kind of system. Two of the black widows exhibit radio eclipses lasting for 10-20% of the orbit, while J1908+2105 eclipses for 40% of the orbit. We investigate an apparent link between gamma-ray emission and a short orbital period among known binary MSPs in the Galactic disk, and conclude that selection effects cannot be ruled out as the cause. Based on this analysis we outline how the likelihood of new MSP discoveries can be improved in ongoing and future pulsar searches.
We report the results from our analysis of a large set of archival data acquired with the X-ray telescope (XRT) onboard Swift, covering the sky region surrounding objects from the first Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) catalogue of high-energy sources (1FHL), which still lack an association. Of the 23 regions analysed, ten did not show any evidence of X-ray emission, but 13 were characterised by the presence of one or more objects emitting in the 0.3-10 keV band. Only in a couple of cases is the X-ray counterpart located outside the Fermi positional uncertainty, while in all other cases the associations found are compatible with the high-energy error ellipses. All counterparts we found have been studied in detail by means of a multi-waveband approach to evaluate their nature or class; in most cases, we have been able to propose a likely or possible association except for one Fermi source whose nature remains doubtful at the moment. The majority of the likely associations are extragalactic in nature, most probably blazars of the BL Lac type.
We have discovered six radio millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in a search with the Arecibo telescope of 34 unidentified gamma-ray sources from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) 4-year point source catalog. Among the 34 sources, we also detected two MSPs previously discovered elsewhere. Each source was observed at a center frequency of 327 MHz, typically at three epochs with individual integration times of 15 minutes. The new MSP spin periods range from 1.99 to 4.66 ms. Five of the six pulsars are in interacting compact binaries (period < 8.1 hr), while the sixth is a more typical neutron star-white dwarf binary with an 83-day orbital period. This is a higher proportion of interacting binaries than for equivalent Fermi-LAT searches elsewhere. The reason is that Arecibos large gain afforded us the opportunity to limit integration times to 15 minutes, which significantly increased our sensitivity to these highly accelerated systems. Seventeen of the remaining 26 gamma-ray sources are still categorized as strong MSP candidates, and will be re-searched.
The HAWC Collaboration released the 2HWC catalog of TeV sources, in which 19 show no association with any known high-energy (HE; E > 10 GeV) or very-high-energy (VHE; E > 300 GeV) sources. This catalog motivated follow-up studies by both the MAGIC and Fermi-LAT observatories with the aim of investigating gamma-ray emission over a broad energy band. In this paper, we report the results from the first joint work between HAWC, MAGIC and Fermi-LAT on three unassociated HAWC sources: 2HWC J2006+341, 2HWC J1907+084* and 2HWC J1852+013*. Although no significant detection was found in the HE and VHE regimes, this investigation shows that a minimum 1 degree extension (at 95% confidence level) and harder spectrum in the GeV than the one extrapolated from HAWC results are required in the case of 2HWC J1852+013*, while a simply minimum extension of 0.16 degrees (at 95% confidence level) can already explain the scenario proposed by HAWC for the remaining sources. Moreover, the hypothesis that these sources are pulsar wind nebulae is also investigated in detail.
Numerous extended sources around Galactic pulsars have shown significant $gamma$-ray emission from GeV to TeV energies, revealing hundreds of TeV energy electrons scattering off of the underlying photon fields through inverse Compton scattering (ICS). HAWC TeV gamma-ray observations of few-degree extended emission around the pulsars Geminga and Monogem, and LAT GeV emission around Geminga, suggest that systems older than 10-100 kyr have multi-TeV $e^pm$ propagating beyond the SNR-PWN system into the interstellar medium. Following the discovery of few $gamma$-ray sources by HAWC at energies E$>100$ TeV, we investigate the presence of an extended $gamma$-ray emission in Fermi-LAT data around the three brightest sources detected by HAWC up to 100 TeV. We find an extended emission of $theta_{68} = 1.00^{+0.05}_{-0.07}$ deg around eHWC J1825-134 and $theta_{68} = 0.71pm0.10$ deg eHWC J1907+063. The analysis with ICS templates on Fermi-LAT data point to diffusion coefficient values which are significantly lower than the average Galactic one. When studied along with HAWC data, the $gamma$-ray Fermi-LAT data provide invaluable insight into the very high-energy electron and positron parent populations.