Two long-term intermittent pulsars discovered in the PALFA Survey
Abstract
We report the discovery of two long-term intermittent radio pulsars in the ongoing Arecibo PALFA pulsar survey. Following discovery with the Arecibo Telescope, extended observations of these pulsars over several years at Jodrell Bank Observatory have revealed the details of their rotation and radiation properties. PSRs J1910+0517 and J1929+1357 show long-term extreme bi-modal intermittency, switching between active (ON) and inactive (OFF) emission states and indicating the presence of a large, hitherto unrecognised, underlying population of such objects. For PSR J1929+1357, the initial duty cycle was fON=0.008, but two years later this changed, quite abruptly, to fON=0.16. This is the first time that a significant evolution in the activity of an intermittent pulsar has been seen and we show that the spin-down rate of the pulsar is proportional to the activity. The spin-down rate of PSR J1929+1357 is increased by a factor of 1.8 when it is in active mode, similar to the increase seen in the other three known long-term intermittent pulsars.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1608.09008,
title = {Two long-term intermittent pulsars discovered in the PALFA Survey},
author = {A. G. Lyne and B. W. Stappers and P. C. C. Freire and J. W. T. Hessels and V. M. Kaspi and B. Allen and S. Bogdanov and A. Brazier and F. Camilo and F. Cardoso and S. Chatterjee and J. M. Cordes and F. Crawford and J. S. Deneva and R. D. Ferdman and F. A. Jenet and B. Knispel and P. Lazarus and J. van Leeuwen and R. Lynch and E. Madsen and M. A. McLaughlin and E. Parent and C. Patel and S. M. Ransom and P. Scholz and A. Seymour and X. Siemens and L. G. Spitler and I. H. Stairs and K. Stovall and J. Swiggum and R. S. Wharton and W. W. Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.09008},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
21 pages, 7 figures, accepted by ApJ