| Astrophysics (Index) | About |
A millisecond pulsar (MSP) is a pulsar with a rotation period of around 1-10 milliseconds. They are often detected using radio waves, X-rays or gamma rays. They are considered recycled pulsars, i.e., pulsars that whose rotation has been increased through accretion from a binary companion, which can switch on the pulses (which require a certain rotation rate that may have been lost as the pulsar aged), and can further increase the rotation to millisecond periods. They tend to have a substantially weaker magnetic field than other pulsars. In addition to the interest in the pulsars themselves, they are useful as extremely accurate clocks at considerable distance, in particular, for pulsar timing arrays (PTAs).
A pulsar that is not an MSP is sometimes referred to as a canonical pulsar (CP).