Diagnostics of timing noise in middle aged pulsars

Abstract

Radio pulsars are often used as clocks in a wide variety of experiments. Imperfections in the clock, known as timing noise, have the potential to reduce the significance of, or even thwart e.g. the attempt to find a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. We measure the timing noise in a group of 129 mostly middle-aged pulsars (i.e. characterstic ages near 1~Myr) observed with the Parkes radio telescope on a monthly basis since 2014. We examine four different metrics for timing noise, but it remains unclear which, if any, provides the best determination. In spite of this, it is evident that these pulsars have significantly less timing noise than their younger counterparts, but significantly more than the (much older) millisecond pulsars (MSPs). As with previous authors, we find a strong correlation between timing noise and the pulsar spin-down rate, $\dot{\nu }$. However, for a given $\dot{\nu }$ there is a spread of about a factor 30 in the strength of the timing noise likely indicating that nuclear conditions in the interior of the stars differs between objects. We briefly comment on the implications for GW detection through pulsar timing arrays as the level of timing noise in MSPs may be less than predicted.

Accepted by MNRAS. 10 pages

References in corpus (9)

• TEMPO2, a new pulsar timing package. I: Overview
• Tests of general relativity from timing the double pulsar
• PSRCHIVE and PSRFITS An Open Approach to Radio Pulsar Data Storage and Analysis
• Switched magnetospheric regulation of pulsar spin-down
• Assessing the Role of Spin Noise in the Precision Timing of Millisecond Pulsars
• Polarimetry of 600 pulsars from observations at 1.4 GHz with the Parkes radio telescope
• New long-term braking index measurements for glitching pulsars using a glitch-template method
• Pulsar Timing for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
• The NANOGrav Nine-Year Data Set: Excess Noise in Millisecond Pulsar Arrival Times

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The impact of glitches on young pulsar rotational evolution
• The UTMOST pulsar timing programme II: Timing noise across the pulsar population
• Pulsar glitch detection with a hidden Markov model
• Parameter estimation of a two-component neutron star model with spin wandering
• Rapid parameter estimation of a two-component neutron star model with spin wandering using a Kalman filter
• NICER study of pulsed thermal X-rays from Calvera: a neutron star born in the Galactic halo?
• Apparent dispersion in pulsar braking index measurements caused by timing noise
• Pulse Frequency Fluctuations of Persistent Accretion Powered Pulsars
• Search for continuous gravitational waves directed at sub-threshold radiometer candidates in O3 LIGO data
• Searches for continuous gravitational waves from young supernova remnants in the early third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo
• Searches for Continuous Gravitational Waves from Supernova Remnants in the first part of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Fourth Observing run