English

Interstellar scintillation and polarization of PSR B0656+14 in the Monogem Ring

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2022-11-16 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

High sensitivity interstellar scintillation and polarization observations of PSR~B0656+14 made at three epochs over a year using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) show that the scattering is dominated by two different compact regions. We identify the one nearer to the pulsar with the shell of the Monogem Ring, thereby confirming the association. The other is probably associated with the Local Bubble. We find that the observed position angles of the pulsar spin axis and the space velocity are significantly different, with a separation of 19\fdg3±19\fdg3\pm0\fdg8, inconsistent with a previously published near-perfect alignment of 1\degr±2\degr1\degr\pm 2\degr. The two independent scattering regions are clearly defined in the secondary spectra which show two strong forward parabolic arcs. The arc curvatures imply that the scattering screens corresponding to the outer and inner arcs are located approximately 28~pc from PSR B0656+14 and 185~pc from the Earth, respectively. Comparison of the observed Doppler profiles with electromagnetic simulations shows that both scattering regions are mildly anisotropic. For the outer arc, we estimate the anisotropy ARA_R to be approximately 1.3, with the scattering irregularities aligned parallel to the pulsar velocity. For the outer arc, we compare the observed delay profiles with delay profiles computed from a theoretical strong-scattering model. Our results suggest that the spatial spectrum of the scattering irregularities in the Monogem Ring is flatter than Kolmogorov, but further observations are required to confirm this.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.14059,
  title  = {Interstellar scintillation and polarization of PSR B0656+14 in the Monogem Ring},
  author = {Jumei Yao and William A. Coles and Richard N. Manchester and Daniel R. Stinebring and Michael Kramer and Na Wang and Di Li and Weiwei Zhu and Yi Feng and Jianping Yuan and Pei Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.14059},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

21 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal