More discovery certificates

Hi,

this question can be answered only by looking at the results of computer simulations of the pulsar population in our Galaxy. These have been done for the PALFA survey, which provides the "Arecibo data" for Einstein@Home. The first (somewhat optimistic) set of these simulations led to the assumption, that "about 1000 new pulsars will be found in the [P]ALFA survey" (see the paper here. So far, the PALFA survey has found of order 100 new pulsars. Of these, 23 were found by Einstein@Home, which joined the PALFA consortium in 2009, four years after the start of the survey.

The survey is still ongoing, looking at new parts of the sky with the very sensitive Arecibo telescope. Many of these observations will allow us to find new pulsars, but personally, I think it is very tricky to give a good estimate of the actual number of pulsar still to be detected. But of order 300 might be rough estimate.

Einstein@Home is only one of several pipelines processing the PALFA data, so any given pulsar might not be found by Einstein@Home first. But – and that is the unique feature of Einstein@Home - our pipeline has the highest sensitivity to pulsars in very tight binary systems. If there's a pulsar out there, orbiting the common centre of mass with a companion in a very short time, Einstein@Home is most likely to find such a rare system.

Cheers, Benjamin

P.S.: As you might have seen on our detailed BRP processing page, Einstein@Home is currently looking at Arecibo data from a different part of the sky. Before (and this is where we found the 23 pulsars) we analyzed data taken when Arecibo was looking toward the inner regions of our Galaxy. These inner-Galaxy telescope pointings are in the first row of the sky plots (black background) at the bottom of the page.

Since a couple of weeks now, we've been analyzing data taken when Arecibo was looking toward the outer regions of our Galaxy. These are displayed in the bottom two rows of the sky plots. Since the density of stars and pulsar progenitors is lower towards the outer Galaxy, I'd expect to find less pulsars while we're analyzing this part of the data. There will be however, fresh and completely new observations of the inner Galaxy available soon, which should contain more previously unknown pulsars.