Simultaneous Absolute Timing of the Crab Pulsar at Radio and Optical Wavelengths

Abstract

The Crab pulsar emits across a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Determining the time delay between the emission at different wavelengths will allow to better constrain the site and mechanism of the emission. We have simultaneously observed the Crab Pulsar in the optical with S-Cam, an instrument based on Superconducting Tunneling Junctions (STJs) with $\mu$s time resolution and at 2 GHz using the Nançay radio telescope with an instrument doing coherent dedispersion and able to record giant pulses data. We have studied the delay between the radio and optical pulse using simultaneously obtained data therefore reducing possible uncertainties present in previous observations. We determined the arrival times of the (mean) optical and radio pulse and compared them using the tempo2 software package. We present the most accurate value for the optical-radio lag of 255 $\pm$ 21 $\mu$s and suggest the likelihood of a spectral dependence to the excess optical emission asociated with giant radio pulses.

8 pages; accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (6)

• TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. I: Overview
• Radio Emission Signatures in the Crab Pulsar
• Pulse Profiles, Spectra and Polarization Characteristics of Non-Thermal Emissions from the Crab-Like Pulsars
• Simultaneous Absolute Timing of the Crab Pulsar at Radio and Optical Wavelengths
• Short time scale pulse stability of the Crab pulsar in the optical band
• On the Present and Future of Pulsar Astronomy

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Pulsar Timing for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
• Optical polarisation of the Crab pulsar: precision measurements and comparison to the radio emission
• Simultaneous Absolute Timing of the Crab Pulsar at Radio and Optical Wavelengths
• Recent glitches detected in the Crab pulsar
• Aqueye+: a new ultrafast single photon counter for optical high time resolution astrophysics
• Test of Weak Equivalence Principle with the multi-band timing of the Crab Pulsar
• The Crab pulsar seen with Aqueye at Asiago Cima Ekar Observatory
• Study of the High Energy Gamma-ray Emission from the Crab Pulsar with the MAGIC telescope and Fermi-LAT
• Phase Evolution of the Crab Pulsar between Radio and X-ray
• Statistics of VHE gamma-Rays in Temporal Association with Radio Giant Pulses from the Crab Pulsar
• Optical photon-counting observation of the Crab pulsar with Kanata telescope using prototype IMONY
• One-week optical observations of pulsed emission from the Crab pulsar with IMONY on the 3.8 m Seimei telescope