Publication Details

AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH

earth and planetary sciences

X-ray and radio timing of the pulsar in 3C 58

Astrophysical Journal, Volume 706, No. 2, Year 2009

We present timing data spanning 6.4 yr for the young and energetic PSR J0205+6449, in the supernova remnant 3C 58. Data were obtained with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, the Jodrell Bank Observatory, and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. We present phase-coherent timing analyses showing timing noise and two spin-up glitches with fractional frequency increases of ∼3.4 × 10-7 near MJD 52555 and ∼3.8 × 10-6 between MJDs 52777 and 53062. These glitches are unusually large if the pulsar was created in the historical supernova in 1181, as has been suggested. For the X-ray timing, we developed a new unbinned maximum likelihood method for determining pulse arrival times, which performs significantly better than the traditional binned techniques. In addition, we present an X-ray pulse profile analysis of four years of RXTE data showing that the pulsar is detected up to ∼40 keV. We also present the first measurement of the phase offset between the radio and X-ray pulse for this source, showing that the radio pulse leads the X-ray pulse by φ = 0.10 0.01 in phase. We compile all known measurements of the phase offsets between radio and X-ray and radio and γ-ray pulses for X-ray and γ-ray pulsars. We show that there is no relationship between pulse period and phase offset, supported by our measurement of the phase offset for PSR J0205+6449. © 2009. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
Statistics
Citations: 45
Authors: 7
Affiliations: 8