Timing the pulsar in IGR J00291+5934: the race is on!
IGR J00291+5934, as well as being the fastest known accretion-powered
millisecond pulsar, is unusual in that it's shown repeated outbursts that
have been observed by RXTE. Jake Hartman, Deepto and I had been
close to submitting a terrific paper doing the phase connection between the
2004 and 2008 outbursts, when to our dismay Alessandro Patruno posted a paper
(arXiv:1006.0815)
with the same timing analysis. Now in a rush to get ours out, three days later
came a separate analysis from Papitto et al.
(arXiv:1006.1303). Finally, two
days later, ours was submitted, to the Astrophysical Journal, and to
arXiv:1006.1908. Of course, I
think ours is best, not least because Jake did a really nice analysis which
interprets the shape of the unusual double 2008 outburst in terms of the
disk ionisation structure. Now it is a
race to see who will get published first!