NICER X-ray Observations of Seven Nearby Rotation-Powered Millisecond Pulsars

Understand

NICER observed several rotation-powered millisecond pulsars to search for or confirm the presence of X-ray pulsations.

• When broad and sine-like, these pulsations may indicate thermal emission from hot polar caps at the magnetic poles on the neutron star surface.
• We report confident detections ($\ge4.7\sigma$ after background filtering) of X-ray pulsations for five of the seven pulsars in our target sample: PSR J0614-3329, PSR J0636+5129, PSR J0751+1807, PSR J1012+5307, and PSR J2241-5236, while PSR J1552+5437 and PSR J1744-1134 remain undetected.
• Of those, only PSR J0751+1807 and PSR J1012+5307 had pulsations previously detected at the 1.7$\sigma$ and almost 3$\sigma$ confidence levels, respectively, in XMM-Newton data.