1998NewA....3..293G

We report the serendipitous discovery of a 7-s X-ray pulsar using data acquired with the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA). The pulsar is detected as an unresolved source located towards a region of the Galactic plane (l,b ~= 29.5,0.08) that coincides with an overdensity of star-formation tracers. The signal suffers tremendous foreground absorption, equivalent to N_H ~= 10^23 cm^ - 2; the absorption correlates well with a line-of-sight that is tangential to the inner spiral arms and the 4-kpc molecular ring. The pulsar is not associated with any known supernova remnants or other cataloged objects in that direction. The near sinusoidal pulse (period P ~= 6.9712) is modulated at 35% pulsed amplitude, and the steep spectrum is characteristic of hot black-body emission with temperature kT ∼ 0.65 keV. We characterize the source a s an anomalous X-ray pulsar (AXP).