Scientific Colloquium
November 13, 2009


"Gamma-ray Pulsars"

Of the several thousand pulsars that have been discovered by radio telescopes over the past forty years, only a handful were known to emit gamma-ray pulsations before the launch last June, 2008, of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.  Almost as soon as Fermi was turned on, new gamma-ray pulsar discoveries began, and a year later the number of known gamma-ray pulsars has increased by nearly a factor of ten.  A sizeable fraction of these have been discovered through their gamma-ray pulsations alone.  The pulsations had not been seen before at any other wavelength but are coming from the locations of many previously unidentified Galactic gamma-ray sources.  For the first time, millisecond pulsars have been confirmed as powerful sources of gamma-ray emission, and a whole population of these objects is seen with the Fermi Large Area Telescope.  From these new discoveries, we have learned that the gamma rays are not emitted in narrow  “lighthouse” beams but in very large fan beams that can be seen from virtually all directions.  Gamma-ray observations may thus provide a unique capability to uncover hidden stellar remnants.



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