Fermi Pulsar Analysis
576 views · Published 14 May 2013 · 0:51 · Indexed 21 September 2026
Channel: NASA Video · 2013 · Science & Technology
This animation illustrates how analysis of Fermi data reveals new pulsars. Fermi's LAT records the precise arrival time and approximate direction of the gamma rays it detects, but to identify a pulsar requires additional information -- its position in the sky, its rotation period, and the rate at which the pulsar's rotation is slowing. The pulsars are so far away that even Fermi's sensitive LAT detects very few gamma rays from these objects -- as few as a single photon per 100,000 rotations. The Hannover team used new methods to carry out a so-called blind search, using computers to check many different combinations of position and rotational behavior, to see if these matched with the arrival times of the Fermi LAT photons coming from near this direction. The search used the 8,000 photons deemed most probable to come from a pulsar at the putative position, which Fermi's LAT had collected during its three years in orbit. When the photon arrival times match up with the putative pulsar position and rotation model, a regular pattern of peaks appears in the gamma-ray photon counts, as a function of the rotational position of the pulsar, and a new gamma-ray pulsar has been discovered. (No audio.) Credit: AEI/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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