Today's NOVA colloquium: Unlocking Secrets of Pulsars with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope

© Alice Harding (NASA/GSFC)

Of the several thousand rotation-powered 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 in June, 2008 of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. After almost six years of operation, over 140 gamma-ray pulsars have been detected and several new populations have been discovered. Millisecond pulsars have been confirmed as powerful sources of gamma-ray emission, and a whole population of these objects is seen with Fermi both in the Galactic plane and in globular clusters. Fermi has thus revolutionized the study of pulsars and allowed us to peer deeper into the inner workings of this incredibly efficient natural accelerator. These discoveries, together with recent progress in global simulation of pulsar magnetospheres, are changing our models of pulsar particle acceleration, cascade pair production and high-energy emission.

(For upcoming ASTRON/JIVE colloquia, see www.astron.nl/colloquia)