New Pulsar in Vulpecula

Abstract

A SECOND pulsar in the constellation Vulpecula has been discovered through observations at the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory. The new pulsar was discovered on August 26, 1968, almost immediately after a new digital reduction program was applied to 111.5 MHz pulsar search data taken some time earlier at this observatory. The new program has the advantage of being extremely sensitive to pulsed signals and of reducing pulsar search data very rapidly. About 4 per cent of the data available at present have now been reduced in this manner with this new pulsar giving the strongest detection. The reduced data also contain several other pulsar suspects which have yet to be checked by further observations. The new reduction program makes feasible a systematic search for pulsars at the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory, and a paper describing the techniques used in the digital reductions is in preparation (R. V. E. Lovelace, J. M. Sutton, E. E. Salpeter and H. D. Craft, jun.).