IKT 16 aka PSR J0058-7218: Discovery of a 22 ms energetic rotation-powered pulsar in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We report here on the discovery with XMM-Newton of pulsations at 22 ms from the central compact source associated with IKT 16, a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The measured spin period and spin period derivative correspond to 21.7661076(2) ms and 2.9(3) × 10-14 s s-1, respectively. Assuming standard spin-down by magnetic dipole radiation, the spin-down power corresponds to 1.1 × 1038 erg s-1 implying a Crab-like pulsar. This makes it the most energetic pulsar discovered in the SMC so far and a close analogue of PSR J0537-6910, a Crab-like pulsar in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The characteristic age of the pulsar is 12 kyr. Having for the first time a period measure for this source, we also searched for the signal in archival data collected in radio with the Parkes telescope and in γ-rays with the Fermi/LAT, but no evidence for pulsation was found in these energy bands.