Pulsars are highly magnetized and rapidly rotating neutron stars, providing us an opportunity to explore physics under extreme conditions. The intensity variation of pulsar emission is erratic on a broad range of timescales from nanoseconds to years, which is a useful probe for the geometrical characteristics of the pulse emission beam, the underlying magnetospheric structure, and the elementary emission mechanism.
Using the Shanghai Tian Ma 65 m radio telescope, astronomers from Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of Chinese Academy of Sciences have performed a detailed study of PSR B0031-07 at C band. The bright pulses are detected in less than 1% of the 15,272 single pulses. The pulse energy appears to follow a logarithmic normal distribution. The bright pulses are almost all narrower and the majority of them tend to cluster in a width of 0.2-15 ms. The peak flux density distribution can be qualitatively approximated by a power law with a spectral index of -3.6 ± 0.2. Approximate 26% of the detected bright pulses present a quasiperiodic microstructure with periodicities ranging from 0.36 to 5.58 ms. Nevertheless, no preferred microstructure period is shown from the single-pulse auto-correlation functions. Such quasiperiodic microstructure emission in PSR B0031–07 is first reported at 4.82 GHz, which is absent at lower frequencies.
The results of this research provide more insights into the bright pulse emission from this pulsar. The study was published September 10 on ApJ.
“Additional work of interest would include polarimetric observations at multifrequency to simultaneously explore the detailed statistical distributions of bright pulses. Such studies could put the observational identification of bright pulses and microstructure on a firmer footing, and advance the theoretical modeling of pulsar emission mechanism.” the authors of the paper explained.
