Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2024-10-30 09:16:04

CosmicRami on Nostr: lots of fun #pulsar papers on arXiv today - but this is my fav (biased of course, ...

lots of fun #pulsar papers on arXiv today - but this is my fav (biased of course, some of these folks in our team, though this is not PPTA paper).

Pulsar radio waves are scattered off turbulent ISM plasma structures (<= AU-sized) and present as scintillation arcs in power spectra analysis. What that means is that when we plot the spectrum over time, we can look at the power of that spectrum and we see these scintillation arcs - they are like ghosts inside the data!

BUT - they tell us things!

Arc curvature depends on distance, velocity, and orientation of scattering layers, so it can help probe these parameters.

This was analysed for PSR J0437-4715 (closest and brightest millisecond pulsar to Earth) so the team modelled the pulsar-WD binary system ploughing through the ISM.

Look at its bow-shock! From this model, they can see that the conical structure is tilted away from our view by about 23-degrees, and is caused by the pulsar moving (very fast) through the interstellar medium.

In that second plt we can't see the pulsar (it's ~20km across), but that bright dot is the white dwarf companion. They're in a 5.7 day orbit, so effectively, from this distance we can say that the pulsar is in the same location.

Check out the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2410.21390

#Astrophysics #Astrodon #RadioAstronomy



Author Public Key
npub19urv0hdzpshhgxt67xkq2df8zlxq4utpwettt4jh9dlpjf4snq5sfrqq4e