Identification of Candidate Millisecond Pulsars from Fermi LAT Observations II

Following our work presented in Dai et al. (2016), we report our detailed data analysis for another 38 Fermi gamma-ray un-associated sources. These sources are selected from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) third source catalog on the basis of the properties of known gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and for the purpose of finding likely candidate MSPs. From our analysis of the LAT data, we identify that among the 38 sources, 28 of them are single point-like sources with clean background and their spectra show significant curvature. We also conduct analysis of archival X-ray data available for 24 of the 28 sources. In the fields of 10 sources, there are at least one X-ray object, and in those of the other 14 sources, no X-ray object is detected but probably due to the X-ray observations being short. We discuss the possible MSP nature for these sources. Six of them(J0514.6-4406, J1035.7-6720, J1624.2-4041, J1744.1-7619, J1946.4-5403, and J2039.6-5618) are most likely associated with pulsars because of multi-wavelength identifications including direct radio or gamma-ray detection of pulsations. To firmly establish the associations or verify the MSP nature for other sources, deep X-ray and/or optical observations are needed.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Early Afterglows of Gamma-Ray Bursts in a Stratified Medium with a Power-Law Density Distribution

A long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) has been widely thought to arise from the collapse of a massive star, and it has been suggested that its ambient medium is a homogenous interstellar medium (ISM) or a stellar wind. There are two shocks when an ultra-relativistic fireball that has been ejected during the prompt gamma-ray emission phase sweeps up the circumburst medium: a reverse shock that propagates into the fireball, and a forward shock that propagates into the ambient medium. In this paper, we investigate the temporal evolution of the dynamics and emission of these two shocks in an environment with a general density distribution of $n\propto R^{-k}$ (where $R$ is the radius) by considering thick-shell and thin-shell cases. A GRB afterglow with one smooth onset peak at early times is understood to result from such external shocks. Thus, we can determine the medium density distribution by fitting the onset peak appearing in the light curve of an early optical afterglow. We apply our model to 19 GRBs, and find that their $k$ values are in the range of 0.4 - 1.4, with a typical value of $k\sim1$, implying that this environment is neither a homogenous interstellar medium with $k=0$ nor a typical stellar wind with $k=2$. This shows that the progenitors of these GRBs might have undergone a new mass-loss evolution.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, published in Ap