Galactic Millisecond Pulsars

Have you ever asked (or been asked) questions such as:

  • how many millisecond pulsars are currently known in the disk of the Milky Way?
  • what is the largest dispersion measure currently known for a millisecond pulsar?
  • has anyone already found this great looking millisecond pulsar candidate?
  • how many isolated millisecond pulsars are currently known?

    If so, then you've reached the right page. If not, carry on surfing.

    Spurred on by the flurry of recent discoveries of millisecond pulsars which are not in print, but floating around the internet, I have put together this simple plain-text file which lists all 424 published and unpublished millisecond pulsars not associated with a globular cluster. A millisecond pulsar is defined as P < 30 ms. Of course, other definitions exist and you can prune the list as you see fit. For instance, the simple 30 ms cut includes the double neutron star systems J0737-3039 and J1756-2251.

    Hopefully this compilation is useful. Please acknowledge the URL in any papers that make use of it. The list was originally developed and maintained by Duncan Lorimer (WVU). It is now being maintained by Elizabeth Ferrara (Univ. of Maryland). We intend to keep it as up-to-date as we can and strongly encourage all observers to send additions and updates or corrections, using the linked Google forms.

    David Smith has contributed this Python script to convert the text file into FITs format.


    Last update: December 6, 2022


    Here are some (old!) plots!