We report the discovery of two Black Widow millisecond pulsars in the globular cluster M28 with the MeerKAT telescope. PSR J1824−2452M (M28M) is a 4.78-ms pulsar in a 5.82hour orbit and PSR J1824−2452N (M28N) is a 3.35-ms pulsar in a 4.76hour orbit. Both pulsars have dispersion measures near 119.30pccm−3 and have low mass companion stars (∼0.01−0.03M⊙), which do not cause strong radio eclipses or orbital variations. Including these systems, there are now five known black widow pulsars in M28. The pulsar searches were conducted as a part of an initial phase of MeerKAT's globular cluster census (within the TRAPUM Large Survey Project). These faint discoveries demonstrate the advantages of MeerKAT's survey sensitivity over previous searches and we expect to find additional pulsars in continued searches of this cluster.
@article{arxiv.2201.11238,
title = {Two New Black Widow Millisecond Pulsars In M28},
author = {Andrew Douglas and Prajwal Padmanabh and Scott Ransom and Alessandro Ridolfi and Paulo Freire and Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan and Ewan Barr and Cristina Pallanca and Mario Cadelano and Andrea Possenti and Ingrid Stairs and Jason Hessels and Megan DeCesar and Ryan Lynch and Matthew Bailes and Marta Burgay and David Champion and Ramesh Karuppusamy and Michael Kramer and Benjamin Stappers and Laila Vleeschower},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.11238},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to ApJ on 12/28/2021 2/17/2022: Added Acknowledgements, Software, and Facilities sections. Fixed missing 'Total Proper Motion' units in table 2