Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 17, 2026

Investigation of Early Plasma Evolution Induced by Ultrashort Laser Pulses
Published on: July 2, 2012
Binary millisecond pulsar discovery via gamma-ray pulsations
H J Pletsch1, L Guillemot, H Fehrmann
1Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut), D-30167 Hannover, Germany. holger.pletsch@aei.mpg.de
Abstract:
Millisecond pulsars, old neutron stars spun up by accreting matter from a companion star, can reach high rotation rates of hundreds of revolutions per second. Until now, all such "recycled" rotation-powered pulsars have been detected by their spin-modulated radio emission. In a computing-intensive blind search of gamma-ray data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (with partial constraints from optical data), we detected a 2.5-millisecond pulsar, PSR J1311-3430. This unambiguously explains a formerly unidentified gamma-ray source that had been a decade-long enigma, confirming previous conjectures. The pulsar is in a circular orbit with an orbital period of only 93 minutes, the shortest of any spin-powered pulsar binary ever found.
Related Concept Videos
Atomic Nuclei: Larmor Precession Frequency
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...
NMR Spectrometers: Radiofrequency Pulses and Pulse Sequences
Atomic Emission Spectroscopy: Instrumentation
Atomic Emission Spectroscopy: Overview
Atomic Emission Spectroscopy: Lab

