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

Submitted on 9 Dec 2016 8:31:51 UTC

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
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Hello!Great news! What is

11 Dec 2016 17:11:19 UTC
Message 152658
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    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
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    Great news another really

    12 Dec 2016 0:56:09 UTC
    Message 152670
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      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
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      Hi,hoarfrost wrote:What

      13 Dec 2016 13:30:11 UTC
      Message 152735 in response to message 152658
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        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
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        Hi, AgentB wrote:I notice

        13 Dec 2016 15:08:17 UTC
        Message 152736 in response to message 152670
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          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
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          Thanks Benjamin. A nice

          18 Dec 2016 0:52:15 UTC
          Message 153009
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            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
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            Congratulations!

            26 Dec 2016 5:26:47 UTC
            Message 153369
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              Congratulations!

              thomas mccrea
              thomas mccrea
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              Well done congrats

              18 Mar 2017 20:32:39 UTC
              Message 156468
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                Well done congrats

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

                11 May 2017 19:56:42 UTC
                Message 157773
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                  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