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Free keywords:
Astrophysics, Galaxy Astrophysics, astro-ph.GA, Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
We have conducted a new search for radio pulsars in compact binary systems in
the Parkes multi-beam pulsar survey (PMPS) data, employing novel methods to
remove the Doppler modulation from binary motion. This has yielded unparalleled
sensitivity to pulsars in compact binaries. The required computation time of
approximately 17 000 CPU core years was provided by the distributed volunteer
computing project Einstein@Home, which has a sustained computing power of about
one PFlop/s. We discovered 24 new pulsars in our search, of which 18 were
isolated pulsars, and six were members of binary systems. Despite the wide
filterbank channels and relatively slow sampling time of the PMPS data, we
found pulsars with very large ratios of dispersion measure (DM) to spin period.
Among those is PSR J1748-3009, the millisecond pulsar with the highest known DM
(420 pc cm^{-3}). We also discovered PSR J1840-0643, which is in a binary
system with an orbital period of 937 days, the fourth largest known. The new
pulsar J1750-2531 likely belongs to the rare class of intermediate-mass binary
pulsars. Three of the isolated pulsars show long-term nulling or intermittency
in their emission, further increasing this growing family. Our discoveries
demonstrate the value of distributed volunteer computing for data-driven
astronomy and the importance of applying new analysis methods to extensively
searched data.