A Statistical Analysis of the Nulling Pulsar Population

Abstract

Approximately 8% of the $\sim$2800 known pulsars exhibit "nulling," a temporary broadband cessation of normal pulsar emission. Nulling behaviour can be coarsely quantified by the nulling fraction, which describes the percentage of time a given pulsar will be found in a null state. In this paper, we perform the most thorough statistical analysis thus far of the properties of 141 known nulling pulsars. We find weak, non-linear correlations between nulling fraction and pulse width, as well as nulling fraction and spin period which could be attributed to selection effects. We also further investigate a recently-hypothesized gap at 40% nulling fraction. While a local minimum does exist in the distribution, we cannot confirm a consistent and unique break in the distribution when we investigate with univariate and multivariate clustering methods, nor can we prove the existence of two statistically distinct populations about this minimum. Using the same methods, we find that nulling pulsars are a statistically different population from normal, radio, non-nulling pulsars, which has never been quantitatively verified. In addition, we summarize the findings of the prior nulling pulsar statistics literature, which are notoriously contradictory. This study, in context, furthers the idea that nulling fraction alone does not contain enough information to describe the behaviour of a nulling pulsar and that other parameters such as null lengths and null randomness, in addition to a better understanding of selection effects, are required to fully understand this phenomenon.

12 pages, 7 figures, accepted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• FAST early pulsar discoveries: Effelsberg follow-up
• Discovery of 37 new pulsars through GPU-accelerated reprocessing of archival data of the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey
• A Pilot Study of Nulling in 22 Pulsars Using Mixture Modeling
• Evolutionary implications of a magnetar interpretation for GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3
• Unveiling the emission properties of three long-period pulsars using FAST
• Discovery and follow-up of a quasiperiodically nulling and sub-pulse drifting pulsar with the Murchison Widefield Array
• Investigation of individual pulse emission behaviours from pulsar J1741$-$0840