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 \simeq 29.5 , 0.08 ) that coincides with an overdensity of star-formation tracers .
The signal suffers tremendous foreground absorption , equivalent to N _ { H } \simeq 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 \simeq 6.9712 ) is modulated at 35 % pulsed amplitude , and the steep spectrum is characteristic of hot black-body emission with temperature kT \sim 0.65 keV .
We characterize the source as an anomalous X-ray pulsar ( AXP ) .