We report on optical observations of the low-mass binary millisecond pulsar systems J0034-0534 and J2145-0750. A faint (I=23.5) object was found to be coincident with the timing position of PSR J2145-0750. While a galaxy or distant main-sequence star cannot be ruled out, its magnitude is consistent with an ancient white dwarf, as expected from evolutionary models. For PSR J0034-0534 no objects were detected to a limiting magnitude of R=25.0, suggesting that the white dwarf in this system is cold. Using white dwarf cooling models, the limit on the magnitude of the PSR J0034-0534 companion suggests that at birth the pulsar in this system may have rotated with a period as short as 0.6 ms. These observations provide further evidence that the magnetic fields of millisecond pulsars do not decay on time scales shorter than 1 Gyr.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9507087,
title = {Optical Observations of the Binary Millisecond Pulsars J2145-0750 and J0034-0534},
author = {J. F. Bell and S. R. Kulkarni and M. Bailes and E. M. Leitch and A. G. Lyne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9507087},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
6 pages, uuencoded, gz -9 compressed postscript, accepted by ApJL