DISCOVERY OF 2 FAST-ROTATING PULSARS

Two fast-rotating pulsars have been discovered at high Galactic latitu des in the course of a systematic survey with the Arecibo telescope. P SR J2235 + 1506 has a period of 59.7 ms, a small magnetic field, and a spin-down time scale in excess of 10(9) yr. It is only the third such object known (outside of globular clusters) which is not a member of a binary system. PSR J2317 + 1439 is a 3.4 ms pulsar in a 2.46 day orb it with a approximately 0.2 M. companion. Its orbital eccentricity e = (1.2 +/- 0.8) x 10(-6) is, to our knowledge, the smallest known for a n orbiting object of any kind. We briefly discuss some characteristics of the rapidly growing sample of ''field'' millisecond pulsars.