Do Pulsar and Fast Radio Burst dispersion measures obey Benford's law?

Abstract

We check if the first significant digit of the dispersion measure of pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (using the CHIME catalog) is consistent with the Benford distribution. We find a large disagreement with Benford's law with ${\chi }^2$ close to 80 for 8 degrees of freedom for both these aforementioned datasets. This corresponds to a discrepancy of about 7$\sigma$. Therefore, we conclude that the dispersion measures of pulsars and FRBs do not obey Benford's law.

5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (6)

• The First CHIME/FRB Fast Radio Burst Catalog
• Statistical Significance of spectral lag transition in GRB 160625B
• Empirical Mantissa Distributions of Pulsars
• High Precision Measurements of Interstellar Dispersion Measure with the upgraded GMRT
• The Newcomb-Benford law: Scale invariance and a simple Markov process based on it
• Benfords law in the Gaia universe