Constraining the Vela Pulsar's Radio Emission Region Using Nyquist-Limited Scintillation Statistics

Abstract

Using a novel technique, we achieve ~100 picoarcsecond resolution and set an upper bound of less than 4 km for the characteristic size of the Vela pulsar's emission region. Specifically, we analyze flux-density statistics of the Vela pulsar at 760 MHz. Because the pulsar exhibits strong diffractive scintillation, these statistics convey information about the spatial extent of the radio emission region. We measure both a characteristic size of the emission region and the emission sizes for individual pulses. Our results imply that the radio emission altitude for the Vela pulsar at this frequency is less than 340 km.

10 Pages, 4 Figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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• Constraining the Vela Pulsar's Radio Emission Region Using Nyquist-Limited Scintillation Statistics
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Nature of Coherent Radio Emission from Pulsars
• Radio Pulsars
• Constraining the Vela Pulsar's Radio Emission Region Using Nyquist-Limited Scintillation Statistics
• Constraining the FRB mechanism from scintillation in the host galaxy
• Refractive lensing of scintillating FRBs by sub-parsec cloudlets in the multi-phase CGM
• Technical constraints on interstellar interferometry and spatially resolving the pulsar magnetosphere
• Strong lensing interferometry for compact binaries
• Vela Pulsar: Single Pulses Analysis with Machine Learning Techniques