Speaker
Description
In 2021, I established a new ERC-funded research group on neutron star astrophysics in Trondheim, Norway. Our main focus has been on compact binary millisecond pulsars: a growing class of Galactic neutron stars nicknamed "spiders". Only one spider pulsar was known in 1990 when the Uppsala Nordic-Baltic conference took place (the original "black widow") and only four were known in 2008 when Fermi was launched. Today, we know more than 100 spider pulsars and candidates, as listed in our 2025 SpiderCAT catalog.
I will present a selection of the most important results we have found in these five years from Trondheim, including i) new super-massive neutron star candidates; ii) new clues on how low-level accretion interacts with the pulsar wind, and iii) the discovery of a universal gamma-ray orbital modulation that defies existing models. I will argue that spider pulsars are key to finding the most massive neutron stars in our Galaxy, and thus to constrain their innermost properties and composition.