High-Resolution Timing Observations of Spin-Powered Pulsars with the AGILE Gamma-Ray Telescope

TL;DR

This paper presents initial high-resolution gamma-ray timing observations of known pulsars using the AGILE satellite, revealing new sub-millisecond features in their high-energy light-curves through precise photon phasing.

Contribution

First detailed gamma-ray timing analysis of pulsars with AGILE, demonstrating its capability to detect fine temporal features in pulsar emission.

Findings

Detected sub-millisecond features in pulsar light-curves.

Collected about 10,000 pulsed counts for Vela in a few months.

Unveiled new timing features through advanced photon phasing techniques.

Abstract

AGILE is a small gamma-ray astronomy satellite mission of the Italian Space Agency dedicated to high-energy astrophysics launched in 2007 April. Its 1 microsecond absolute time tagging capability coupled with a good sensitivity in the 30 MeV-30 GeV range, with simultaneous X-ray monitoring in the 18-60 keV band, makes it perfectly suited for the study of gamma-ray pulsars following up on the CGRO/EGRET heritage. In this paper we present the first AGILE timing results on the known gamma-ray pulsars Vela, Crab, Geminga and B 1706-44. The data were collected from 2007 July to 2008 April, exploiting the mission Science Verification Phase, the Instrument Timing Calibration and the early Observing Pointing Program. Thanks to its large field of view, AGILE collected a large number of gamma-ray photons from these pulsars (about 10,000 pulsed counts for Vela) in only few months of observations. The coupling of AGILE timing capabilities, simultaneous radio/X-ray monitoring and new tools aimed at precise photon phasing, exploiting also timing noise correction, unveiled new interesting features at sub-millisecond level in the pulsars' high-energy light-curves.