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Published Online January 12, 2006
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1123430

Reports

Submitted on December 5, 2005
Accepted on January 6, 2006

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 Camilo 5

1 Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2T8, Canada.
2 NRAO, 520 Edgemont Rd., Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada.
4 NAIC, 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.
Jason W. T. Hessels , E-mail: hessels{at}physics.mcgill.ca

We have discovered a 716-Hz eclipsing binary radio pulsar in the globular cluster Terzan 5 using the Green Bank Telescope. It is the fastest-spinning neutron star ever found, breaking the 23-year-old record held by the 642-Hz pulsar B1937+21. The difficulty in detecting this pulsar, due to 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 2 M{odot}, then its radius is constrained by the spin rate to be <16 km. The short period of this pulsar also constrains models that suggest gravitational radiation, through an r-mode instability, limits the maximum spin frequency of neutron stars.




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