Abstract Of the nearly 500 known pulsars, only seven pulsars are in binary systems. In this article, I review the identification of binary pulsars with emphasis on the critical and unique information provided by optical observations. Optical observations have provided: (i) basic conformation of the stellar evolution acenarios and (ii) observational evidence for the asymptotic field decay in neutrons stars. This review is heavily biased towards the interpretation of the optical results and in particular, the impact of optical observations on the evolution of magnetic fields of pulsars. Proper appreciation of the optical data requires a full understanding of the stellar evolutionary scenarios for binary pulsars and the evolution of magnetic field in pulsars. These topics are discussed in sections 1,2 and 3. In section 4, the theoretical expectations of the optical properties of binary pulsars are summarized. In section 5, I discuss the optical observations of all the known binary pulsars. In two cases we find a major discrepancy between our theoretical expectation and observation. This dilemma is resolved by the asymptotic magnetic field decay hyothesis which is discussed in section 6. A brief comment on the notation: the pulsar will be referred to as the “primary” and the companion as the “secondary” This terminology is appropriate since the progenitor of the pulsars is always more massive than the secondary (see section 1).
Optical identification of binary pulsars
Advances in Space Research ; 8 , 2-3 ; 343-350
1988-01-01
8 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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