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Jenet, F A

Publications and source records attributed to Jenet, F A.

2 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2012

DISCOVERY OF THE OPTICAL/ULTRAVIOLET/GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPART TO THE ECLIPSING MILLISECOND PULSAR J1816+4510

The energetic, eclipsing millisecond pulsar J1816+4510 was recently discovered in a low-frequency radio survey with the Green Bank Telescope. With an orbital period of 8.7 hr and a minimum companion mass of 0.16 M{sub Sun }, it appears to belong to an increasingly important class of pulsars that are ablating their low-mass companions. We report the discovery of the {gamma}-ray counterpart to this pulsar and present a likely optical/ultraviolet counterpart as well. Using the radio ephemeris, we detect pulsations in the unclassified {gamma}-ray source 2FGL J1816.5+4511, implying an efficiency of {approx}25% in converting the pulsar's spin-down luminosity into {gamma}-rays and adding PSR J1816+4510 to the large number of millisecond pulsars detected by Fermi. The likely optical/UV counterpart was identified through position coincidence (<0.''1) and unusual colors. Assuming that it is the companion, with R = 18.27 {+-} 0.03 mag and effective temperature {approx}> 15,000 K, it would be among the brightest and hottest of low-mass pulsar companions and appears qualitatively different from other eclipsing pulsar systems. In particular, current data suggest that it is a factor of two larger than most white dwarfs of its mass but a factor of four smaller than its Roche lobe. We discuss possible reasons for its high temperature and odd size, and suggest that it recently underwent a violent episode of mass loss. Regardless of origin, its brightness and the relative unimportance of irradiation make it an ideal target for a mass, and hence a neutron star mass, determination.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2012

PRACTICAL METHODS FOR CONTINUOUS GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTION USING PULSAR TIMING DATA

Gravitational waves (GWs) are tiny ripples in the fabric of space time predicted by Einstein's general relativity. Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are well poised to detect low-frequency (10{sup -9}-10{sup -7} Hz) GWs in the near future. There has been a significant amount of research into the detection of a stochastic background of GWs from supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs). Recent work has shown that single continuous sources standing out above the background may be detectable by PTAs operating at a sensitivity sufficient to detect the stochastic background. The most likely sources of continuous GWs in the pulsar timing frequency band are extremely massive and/or nearby SMBHBs. In this paper we present detection strategies including various forms of matched filtering and power spectral summing. We determine the efficacy and computational cost of such strategies. It is shown that using an optimal matched filter explicitly including the poorly constrained pulsar distances with a grid-based method is computationally infeasible. We show that an Earth-term-matched filter constructed using only the correlated signal terms is robust, computationally viable and highly sensitive to GW signals. We further show that a simple power spectral summing technique is nearly equivalent to the Earth-term-matched filter in terms of the minimum detectable amplitude. Both of these techniques are only a factor of two less sensitive than the computationally unrealizable optimal matched filter. We also show that a pairwise matched filter, taking the pulsar distances into account, is comparable to the optimal matched filter for the single template case and comparable to the Earth-term-matched filter for many search templates. Finally, using simulated data optimal quality, we place a theoretical minimum detectable strain amplitude of h > 2 Multiplication-Sign 10{sup -15} from continuous GWs at frequencies on the order {approx}1/T{sub obs}.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗