Prospects for High Energy Studies of Pulsars with the Agile Gamma-ray Telescope
نویسنده
چکیده
AGILE is a small gamma-ray astronomy satellite, with good spatial resolution, excellent timing capabilities and an unprecedented large field of view (∼1/5 of the sky). It will be the next mission dedicated to high energy astrophysics in the range 30 MeV-50 GeV, and will be launched in 2004. Pulsars are a major topic of investigation of AGILE and, besides studying the small sample of known objects, AGILE will offer the first possibility of detecting several young and energetic radio pulsars that have been discovered since the end of the CGRO mission. We provide an estimate of the expected number of detectable gamma-ray pulsars and present AGILE capabilities for timing analysis with small counting statistics, based on the analysis of data from simulations, from the EGRET archive, and from radio pulsar catalogs.
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