Please contact divya.singh@berkeley.edu, tianqi.zhao@berkeley.edu, or klund@berkeley.edu for zoom links.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars with beamed emission coming from near the magnetic poles. The rapid rotation causes the beams to sweep across the sky, similar to a lighthouse, and appear as pulsed emission. By measuring the arrival times of these pulses, we can study various properties of these pulsars from astrometric position and motion across the sky (i.e. proper motion) to the spin down rate and magnetic field strength. More than 300 γ-ray pulsars have been detected across 17 years of Fermi’s continuous observing with nearly half being young pulsars. Measuring the proper motion of these young pulsars informs us about the birth mechanisms and velocities/kicks of neutron stars and is possible via pulsar timing. γ-ray pulsar timing is generally more difficult than radio timing due to the low number of collected γ-ray photons and high confusion with background sources. We are using Bayesian analysis and MCMC techniques to maximize the amount of information extracted using individual photons and Fermi-LAT’s 17 year-long continuous data set to time radio-quiet young pulsars. Using our recently developed technique, we have measured the proper motion for 5 young radio-quiet pulsars with 3 potential nearby associations, such as nebulae. During our analysis, we identified unusual periodic signals within the time correlated noise of a pulsar, indicating the likely first discovery of planets around a young pulsar. In this talk, I will provide some background on pulsars and how they form, our source selection criteria, the techniques we used to measure the proper motions of young radio-quiet γ-ray pulsars, and our serendipitous pulsar planets discovery.