Two pulsars (PSR J0737-3039A and B) were recently discovered in highly relativistic orbits around one another. The system contains a rapidly rotating pulsar with a spin period of 22.7 ms and a slow ...companion with a spin period of 2.77 s, referred to here as 'A' and 'B', respectively. A unique property of the system is that the pulsed radio flux from B increases systematically by almost two orders of magnitude during two short portions of its orbit. Here we report a geometrical model of the system that simultaneously explains the intensity variations of B and provides constraints on the spin axis orientation and emission geometry of A. Our model assumes that B's pulsed radio flux increases when illuminated by emission from A. We predict that A's pulse profile will evolve considerably over the next several years owing to geodetic precession until it disappears entirely in 15-20 years.
Recent discoveries of transient radio events have renewed interest in time-variable astrophysical phenomena. Many radio transient events are rare, requiring long observing times for reliable ...statistical study. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network (DSN) tracks spacecraft nearly continuously with 13 large-aperture, low system temperature radio antennas. During normal spacecraft operations, the DSN processes only a small fraction of the pre-detection bandwidth available from these antennas; any information in the remaining bandwidth, e.g., from an astronomical source in the same antenna beam as the spacecraft, is currently ignored. As a firmware modification to the standard DSN tracking receiver, we built a prototype receiver that could be used for astronomical transient surveys. Here, we demonstrate the receiver's utility through observations of bright pulses from the Crab pulsar and describe attributes of potential transient survey observations piggybacking on operational DSN tracks.
In the modern era of big data, many fields of astronomy are generating huge volumes of data, the analysis of which can sometimes be the limiting factor in research. In this paper, we present a novel ...artificial intelligence (AI) program that identifies pulsars from recent surveys by using image pattern recognition with deep neural nets-the PICS (Pulsar Image-based Classification System) AI. The AI mimics human experts and distinguishes pulsars from noise and interference by looking for patterns from candidate plots. Different from other pulsar selection programs that search for expected patterns, the PICS AI is taught the salient features of different pulsars from a set of human-labeled candidates through machine learning. The training candidates are collected from the Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array (PALFA) survey. The performance of this system can be improved over time as more training data are accumulated. This AI system has been integrated into the PALFA survey pipeline and has discovered six new pulsars to date.
Radio pulsars emit regular bursts of radio radiation that propagate through the interstellar medium (ISM), the tenuous gas and plasma between the stars. Previously known dispersive properties of the ...ISM cause low-frequency pulses to be delayed in time with respect to high frequency ones. This effect can be explained by the presence of free electrons in the medium. The ISM also contains neutral hydrogen that has a well-known resonance at 1420.4 MHz. Electromagnetic theory predicts that at such a resonance, the induced dispersive effects will be drastically different from those of the free electrons. Pulses traveling through a cloud of neutral hydrogen should undergo 'anomalous dispersion', which causes the group velocity of the medium to be larger than the speed of light in vacuum. This superluminal group velocity causes pulses containing frequencies near the resonance to arrive earlier in time with respect to other pulses. Hence, these pulses appear to travel faster than light. This phenomenon is caused by an interplay between the timescales present in the pulse and the timescales present in the medium. Although counter-intuitive, it does not violate the laws of special relativity. Here, we present Arecibo observations of the radio pulsar PSR B1937+21 that show clear evidence of anomalous dispersion. Though this effect is known in laboratory physics, this is the first time it has been directly observed in an astrophysical context, and it has the potential to be a useful tool for studying the properties of neutral hydrogen in the Galaxy.
We present the discovery and phase-coherent timing of four highly dispersed millisecond pulsars (MSPs) from the Arecibo PALFA Galactic plane survey: PSRs J1844+0115, J1850+0124, J1900+0308, and ...J1944+2236. Three of the four pulsars are in binary systems with low-mass companions, which are most likely white dwarfs, and which have orbital periods on the order of days. The fourth pulsar is isolated. All four pulsars have large dispersion measures (DM > 100 pc cm super(-3)), are distant (gap3.4 kpc), faint at 1.4 GHz (lap0.2 mJy), and are fully recycled (with spin periods P between 3.5 and 4.9 ms). The three binaries also have very small orbital eccentricities, as expected for tidally circularized, fully recycled systems with low-mass companions. These four pulsars have DM/P ratios that are among the highest values for field MSPs in the Galaxy. These discoveries bring the total number of confirmed MSPs from the PALFA survey to 15. The discovery of these MSPs illustrates the power of PALFA for finding weak, distant MSPs at low-Galactic latitudes. This is important for accurate estimates of the Galactic MSP population and for the number of MSPs that the Square Kilometer Array can be expected to detect.
Einstein's theory of gravity predicts waves of the distortion of spacetime with two degrees of polarization; alternative theories predict more polarizations, up to a maximum of six. Although laser ...interferometric gravity wave detectors can be used to search for at least some of the non-Einsteinian polarizations, their configuration is not optimal for the task. By contrast, the angular distribution of pulsars in the sky makes pulsar timing a flexible tool for detecting all polarizations. We give here an analysis of the sensitivity of pulsar timing to an isotropic stochastic gravitational wave background of waves with non-Einsteinian polarizations and conclude that their detection may be feasible in the near future. In particular, we compute the number of pulsars necessary to detect a stochastic background made up of one type of polarization and to distinguish non-Einsteinian from standard polarizations. We conclude that for biweekly observations made for five years with rms timing accuracy of 100 ns, detecting non-Einsteinian modes will require: 60 pulsars in the case of the longitudinal mode; 60 for the two spin-1 'shear' modes; and 40 for the spin-0 'breathing' mode. These are targets that should be easily achievable with the proposed Square Kilometer Array project. To discriminate non-Einsteinian modes from Einsteinian modes, we need 40 pulsars for the breathing mode, 100 pulsars for the longitudinal mode, and 500 pulsars for the shear mode. We confirm the previous estimate that 40 pulsars are needed to detect the spin-2 'transverse' (Einsteinian) polarizations. Better focused statistical tests may allow improvements in sensitivity for some of these polarizations.
The possible existence of intermediate-mass binary black holes (IMBBHs) in globular clusters (GCs) offers us a unique geometry in which to detect spacetime oscillations. For certain pulsar-IMBBH ...configurations possible within a GC, the usual far-field plane wave approximation for the IMBBH metric perturbation severely underestimates the induced pulse time-of-arrival (TOA) fluctuations. In this Letter, the expected TOA fluctuations induced by an IMBBH lying close to the line of sight between a pulsar and the Earth are calculated for the first time. For an IMBBH consisting of 10 and 10 super(3) M sub( )components, a 10 yr orbital period, and located 0.1 lt-yr from the Earth-pulsar line of sight, the induced TOA fluctuations will be of order 5-500 ns.
ABSTRACT We report the discovery of the millisecond pulsar (MSP) PSR J1950+2414 (P = 4.3 ms) in a binary system with an eccentric (e = 0.08) 22 day orbit in Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array survey ...observations with the Arecibo telescope. Its companion star has a median mass of 0.3 M and is most likely a white dwarf (WD). Fully recycled MSPs like this one are thought to be old neutron stars spun-up by mass transfer from a companion star. This process should circularize the orbit, as is observed for the vast majority of binary MSPs, which predominantly have orbital eccentricities e < 0.001. However, four recently discovered binary MSPs have orbits with 0. 027 < e < 0.44; PSR J1950+2414 is the fifth such system to be discovered. The upper limits for its intrinsic spin period derivative and inferred surface magnetic field strength are comparable to those of the general MSP population. The large eccentricities are incompatible with the predictions of the standard recycling scenario: something unusual happened during their evolution. Proposed scenarios are (a) initial evolution of the pulsar in a triple system which became dynamically unstable, (b) origin in an exchange encounter in an environment with high stellar density, (c) rotationally delayed accretion-induced collapse of a super-Chandrasekhar WD, and (d) dynamical interaction of the binary with a circumbinary disk. We compare the properties of all five known eccentric MSPs with the predictions of these formation channels. Future measurements of the masses and proper motion might allow us to firmly exclude some of the proposed formation scenarios.
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