Discovery of an Ultra-fast X-ray Pulsar in the Supernova Remnant N157B

Session 74 - Pulsars.
Oral session, Thursday, June 11
DeAnza/Mesa,

[74.05] Discovery of an Ultra-fast X-ray Pulsar in the Supernova Remnant N157B

F. E. Marshall, W. Zhang (NASA/GSFC), E. V. Gotthelf (NASA/GSFC and USRA), J. Middleditch (LANL), Q. D. Wang (Northwestern U.)

We report the discovery of 16 ms pulsed X-ray emission from the Crab-like SNR N157B in the LMC. This is the fastest spinning pulsar associated with a SNR. Observations with RXTE reveal an X-ray pulsar with a narrow pulse profile. Archival ASCA data confirm this detection and locate the pulsar within 1' of N157B. The pulsar manifests evidence for glitch(es) between the RXTE and ASCA observations which span 3.5 years; the mean spin-down rate is 5.126e-14 s/s. The pulsed emission is similar to other Crab-like pulsars with a power law of photon index of 1.6. The characteristic spin-down age of about 5000 years is consistent with the previous age estimate of the SNR. Our result confirms the Crab-like nature of N157B; the pulsar is likely associated with a compact X-ray source revealed by ROSAT HRI observations.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: frank.marshall@gsfc.nasa.gov

Program listing for Thursday