RESUMEN
Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are old neutron stars that spin hundreds of times per second and appear to pulsate as their emission beams cross our line of sight. To date, radio pulsations have been detected from all rotation-powered MSPs. In an attempt to discover radio-quiet gamma-ray MSPs, we used the aggregated power from the computers of tens of thousands of volunteers participating in the Einstein@Home distributed computing project to search for pulsations from unidentified gamma-ray sources in Fermi Large Area Telescope data. This survey discovered two isolated MSPs, one of which is the only known rotation-powered MSP to remain undetected in radio observations. These gamma-ray MSPs were discovered in completely blind searches without prior constraints from other observations, raising hopes for detecting MSPs from a predicted Galactic bulge population.
RESUMEN
Fully coherent searches (over realistic ranges of parameter space and year-long observation times) for unknown sources of continuous gravitational waves are computationally prohibitive. Less expensive hierarchical searches divide the data into shorter segments which are analyzed coherently, then detection statistics from different segments are combined incoherently. The novel method presented here solves the long-standing problem of how best to do the incoherent combination. The optimal solution exploits large-scale parameter-space correlations in the coherent detection statistic. Application to simulated data shows dramatic sensitivity improvements compared with previously available (ad hoc) methods, increasing the spatial volume probed by more than 2 orders of magnitude at lower computational cost.