Thirteen enthusiastic pulsarists packed into the
Arecibo control room today for the first observations of the ALFA
Pulsar consortium! A pulsar was very quickly discovered!
The PALFA Consortium began its precursor survey on 2004, August 1. In the
first hour of our first observing session on the inner Galaxy, we have
discovered a 68 ms pulsar with a dispersion measure of about 170
pc/cm**3. It is strong enough to be detected in multiple scans with
ALFA and 100 MHz WAPP spectrometers, but it is too weak to have been
detected in previous pulsar surveys. The initial set of scans we
obtained do not indicate any changes in pulsar period from any orbital
Doppler effect, so the pulsar does not appear to be in a compact
binary. Over the course of this month we will assess whether this is a
young pulsar with high magnetic field or an old, recycled pulsar. The
data with degraded time and frequency resolutions were processed in
quasi-real time using code by Dunc Lorimer ported to the Arecibo
Signal Processor developed at UC Berkeley, UBC and Princeton. Data
will be reanalyzed at full resolution.
The Pulsar-ALFA Consortium
Present at observing:
* Fernando Camilo (Columbia),
* David Champion (Jodrell),
* Jim Cordes (Cornell),
* Julia Deneva (Cornell),
* Paulo Freire (NAIC),
* Jason Hessels (McGill),
* Daniel LePage (Cornell),
* Dunc Lorimer (Jodrell),
* David Nice (Princeton),
* Vijal Parikh (Cornell),
* Beth Reid (Princeton),
* Wouter Vlemmings (Cornell)
