Gaia pulsars and where to find them in EDR3

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for Gaia EDR3 counterparts to known pulsars, identifying 41 candidate pairs, refining pulsar distances, and highlighting potential new optical counterparts using precise astrometry.

Contribution

It introduces a method to find Gaia counterparts to pulsars and reports new candidate associations and improved distance estimates.

Findings

41 astrometric pairs identified with pulsars

26 known optical counterparts confirmed

New candidate optical counterparts proposed

Abstract

The Early Gaia Data Release 3 (EDR3) provides precise astrometry for nearly 1.5 billion sources across the entire sky. A few tens of these are associated with neutron stars in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Here, we report on a search for EDR3 counterparts to known rotation-powered pulsars using the method outlined in Antoniadis (2021). A cross-correlation between EDR3 and the ATNF pulsar catalogue identifies 41 close astrometric pairs ($< 0.5$ arcsec at the reference epoch of the pulsar position). Twenty six of these are related to previously-known optical counterparts, while the rest are candidate pairs that require further follow-up. Highlights include the Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21), for which EDR3 yields a distance of $2.08^{+0.78}_{-0.45}$ kpc (or $2.00_{-0.38}^{+0.56}$ kpc taking into account the dispersion-measure prior; errors indicate 95% confidence limits) and PSR J1638-4608, a pulsar thus-far considered to be isolated that lies within 0.056 arcsec of a Gaia source.