Observations of Spin-Powered Pulsars with the AGILE Gamma-Ray Telescope

AGILE is a small gamma-ray astronomy satellite mission of the Italian Space Agency dedicated to high-energy astrophysics launched in 2007 April. It provides large sky exposure levels (> or approx. 109 cm2 s per year on the Galactic Plane) with sensitivity peaking at E∼400 MeV(and simultaneous X-ray monitoring in the 18-60 keV band) where the bulk of pulsar energy output is typically released. Its ∼1 μs is absolute time tagging capability makes it perfectly suited for the study of gamma-ray pulsars following up on the CGRO/EGRET heritage. In this paper we summarize the timing results obtained during the first year of AGILE observations of the known gamma-ray pulsars Vela, Crab, Geminga and B 1706-4. AGILE collected a large number of gamma-ray photons from EGRET pulsars (∼10,000 pulsed counts for Vela) in only few months of observations unveiling new interesting features at sub-millisecond level in the pulsars' high-energy light-curves and paving the way to the discovery of new gamma-ray pulsars.