Timing of five millisecond pulsars discovered in the PALFA survey

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery and detailed timing of five new millisecond pulsars from the PALFA survey, highlighting their faintness, distance, and potential to improve models of the Galactic MSP population.

Contribution

It presents five newly discovered MSPs with precise timing solutions, demonstrating PALFA's capability to detect faint, distant pulsars and providing valuable data for population studies.

Findings

Five new MSPs discovered with detailed timing solutions.

All pulsars are faint and distant, with high dispersion measures.

One pulsar has the highest known dispersion measure among MSPs.

Abstract

We present the discovery of five millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from the PALFA Galactic plane survey using Arecibo. Four of these (PSRs J0557+1551, J1850+0244, J1902+0300, and J1943+2210) are binary pulsars whose companions are likely white dwarfs, and one (PSR J1905+0453) is isolated. Phase-coherent timing solutions, ranging from $\sim$1 to $\sim$3 years in length, and based on observations from the Jodrell Bank and Arecibo telescopes, provide precise determinations of spin, orbital, and astrometric parameters. All five pulsars have large dispersion measures ($>100$ pc cm$^{-3}$, within the top 20% of all known Galactic field MSPs) and are faint (1.4 GHz flux density < 0.1 mJy, within the faintest 5% of all known Galactic field MSPs), illustrating PALFA's ability to find increasingly faint, distant MSPs in the Galactic plane. In particular, PSR J1850+0244 has a dispersion measure of 540 pc cm$^{-3}$, the highest of all known MSPs. Such distant, faint MSPs are important input for accurately modeling the total Galactic MSP population.