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Originally published in Science Express on 12 January 2006
Science 31 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5769, pp. 1901 - 1904
DOI: 10.1126/science.1123430
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Reports

A Radio Pulsar Spinning at 716 Hz

Jason W. T. Hessels,1* Scott M. Ransom,2 Ingrid H. Stairs,3 Paulo C. C. Freire,4 Victoria M. Kaspi,1 Fernando Camilo5

We have discovered a 716-hertz eclipsing binary radio pulsar in the globular cluster Terzan 5 using the Green Bank Telescope. It is the fastest spinning neutron star found to date, breaking the 24-year record held by the 642-hertz pulsar B1937+21. The difficulty in detecting this pulsar, because of its very low flux density and high eclipse fraction (~40% of the orbit), suggests that even faster spinning neutron stars exist. If the pulsar has a mass less than twice the mass of the Sun, then its radius must be constrained by the spin rate to be <16 kilometers. The short period of this pulsar also constrains models that suggest that gravitational radiation, through an r-mode (Rossby wave) instability, limits the maximum spin frequency of neutron stars.

1 Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2T8, Canada.
2 National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada.
4 National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo Observatory, HC03 Box 53995, PR 00612, USA.
5 Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, 550 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hessels{at}physics.mcgill.ca

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)