Nanosecond radio bursts from strong plasma turbulence in the Crab pulsar

Hankins, T. H.; Kern, J.; Weatherall, James C.; Eilek, J. A.

doi:10.1038/nature01477

Cited by 362 publications

(411 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Observations by Hankins et al (2003) revealed that giant pulses at 5.5 GHz contain nanosecond wide subpulses and the presence of such narrow features has been predicted in numerical modelling by Weatherall (1998). At these frequencies the radio emission character of the Crab pulsar changes, with the interpulse emission becoming dominant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Giant pulses from the Crab pulsar

Karuppusamy

Stappers

Straten³

2010

A&A

109

111

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The Crab pulsar is well-known for its anomalous giant radio pulse emission. Past studies have concentrated only on the very bright pulses or were insensitive to the faint end of the giant pulse luminosity distribution. With our new instrumentation offering a large bandwidth and high time resolution combined with the narrow radio beam of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), we seek to probe the weak giant pulse emission regime. The WSRT was used in a phased array mode, resolving a large fraction of the Crab nebula. The resulting pulsar signal was recorded using the PuMa II pulsar backend and then coherently dedispersed and searched for giant pulse emission. After careful flux calibration, the data were analysed to study the giant pulse properties. The analysis includes the distributions of the measured pulse widths, intensities, energies, and scattering times. The weak giant pulses are shown to form a separate part of the intensity distribution. The large number of giant pulses detected were used to analyse scattering and scintillation in giant pulses. We report for the first time the detection of giant pulse emission at both the main-and interpulse phases within a single rotation period. The rate of detection is consistent with the appearance of pulses at either pulse phase as being independent. These pulse pairs were used to examine the scintillation timescales within a single pulse period.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Giant pulses from the Crab pulsar

Karuppusamy

Stappers

Straten³

2010

A&A

109

111

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“…In reality, however, pulsars have been shown to exhibit variability in their emission over every timescale which they can be observed (i.e. from nanosecond bursts to multi-decadal variations; see, e.g., Hankins et al 2003;Keane 2013;Lyne et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term observations of three nulling pulsars

Young

Weltevrede

Stappers

et al. 2015

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We present an analysis of approximately 200 hours of observations of the pulsars J1634−5107, J1717−4054 and J1853+0505, taken over the course of 14.7 yr. We show that all of these objects exhibit long term nulls and radio-emitting phases (i.e. minutes to many hours), as well as considerable nulling fractions (NFs) in the range ∼ 67 % − 90 %. PSR J1717−4054 is also found to exhibit short timescale nulls (1 − 40 P ) and burst phases ( 200 P ) during its radio-emitting phases. This behaviour acts to modulate the NF, and therefore the detection rate of the source, over timescales of minutes. Furthermore, PSR J1853+0505 is shown to exhibit a weak emission state, in addition to its strong and null states, after sufficient pulse integration. This further indicates that nulls may often only represent transitions to weaker emission states which are below the sensitivity thresholds of particular observing systems. In addition, we detected a peak-to-peak variation of 33 ± 1 % in the spin-down rate of PSR J1717−4054, over timescales of hundreds of days. However, no long-term correlation with emission variation was found.

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“…The width of this GP is τ ≤ 15 ns (Soglasnov et al 2004). Hankins et al (2003) found in pulsar PSR B0531+21 the pulse structure as short as 2 ns. If one interprets this pulse duration in terms of the maximum possible size of emitting region l ≤ c × τ , where c is the speed of a light, the time-scale τ =2 ns corresponds to a light-travel size of an emitting body l of only 60 cm, the smallest object ever detected outside our solar system.…”

Section: Observationsmentioning

confidence: 89%