2020/12/08 by John Antoniadis, Antoniadis, John · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.06335
openalex publication_date 2020/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Early Gaia Data Release 3 (EDR3) provides precise astrometry for nearly 1.5 billion sources across the entire sky. A few tens of these are associated with neutron stars in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Here, we report on a search for EDR3 counterparts to known rotation-powered pulsars using the method outlined in Antoniadis (2021). A cross-correlation between EDR3 and the ATNF pulsar catalogue identifies 41 close astrometric pairs (< 0.5 arcsec at the reference epoch of the pulsar position). Twenty six of these are related to previously-known optical counterparts, while the rest are candidate pairs that require further follow-up. Highlights include the Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21), for which EDR3 yields a distance of 2.08+0.78-0.45 kpc (or 2.00-0.38+0.56 kpc taking into account the dispersion-measure prior; errors indicate 95% confidence limits) and PSR J1638-4608, a pulsar thus-far considered to be isolated that lies within 0.056 arcsec of a Gaia source.