Publication Details

AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH

earth and planetary sciences

Time-domain and spectral properties of pulsars at 154 MHz

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 461, No. 1, Year 2016

We present 154 MHz Murchison Widefield Array imaging observations and variability information for a sample of pulsars. Over the declination range -80° < δ < 10°, we detect 17 known pulsars with mean flux density greater than 0.3 Jy. We explore the variability properties of this sample on time-scales of minutes to years. For three of these pulsars, PSR J0953+0755, PSR J0437-4715, and PSR J0630-2834, we observe interstellar scintillation and variability on time-scales of greater than 2 min. One further pulsar, PSR J0034-0721, showed significant variability, the physical origins of which are difficult to determine. The dynamic spectra for PSR J0953+0755 and PSR J0437-4715 showdiscrete time and frequency structure consistent with diffractive interstellar scintillation and we present the scintillation bandwidth and timescales from these observations. The remaining pulsars within our sample were statistically non-variable. We also explore the spectral properties of this sample and find spectral curvature in pulsars PSR J0835-4510, PSR J1752-2806, and PSR J0437-4715.

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Citations: 38
Authors: 38
Affiliations: 22
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