A Pilot Study of Nulling in 22 Pulsars Using Mixture Modeling

Abstract

The phenomenon of pulsar nulling, observed as the temporary inactivity of a pulsar, remains poorly understood both observationally and theoretically. Most observational studies that quantify nulling employ a variant of Ritchings (1976)'s algorithm which can suffer significant biases for pulsars where the emission is weak. Using a more robust mixture model method, we study pulsar nulling in a sample of 22 recently discovered pulsars, for which we publish the nulling fractions for the first time. These data clearly demonstrate biases of the former approach and show how an otherwise non-nulling pulsar can be classified as having significant nulls. We show that the population-wide studies that find a positive correlation of nulling with pulsar period/characteristic age can similarly be biased because of the bias in estimating the nulling fraction. We use our probabilistic approach to find the evidence for periodicity in the nulls in a subset of three pulsars in our sample. In addition, we also provide improved timing parameters for 17 of the 22 pulsars that had no prior follow-up.

Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ)

References in corpus (10)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• A periodically active pulsar giving insight into magnetospheric physics
• Pulsar Nulling and Mode Changing
• The Green Bank Northern Celestial Cap Pulsar Survey - I: Survey Description, Data Analysis, and Initial Results
• The Green Bank Telescope 350 MHz Drift-scan Survey II: Data Analysis and the Timing of 10 New Pulsars, Including a Relativistic Binary
• Deep Analyses of Nulling in Arecibo Pulsars Reveal Further Periodic Behavior
• Simultaneous Single-Pulse Observations of Radio Pulsars: V. On the Broadband Nature of The Pulse Nulling Phenomenon in PSR B1133+16
• Frequency independent quenching of pulsed emission
• The Pulsar Search Collaboratory: Discovery and Timing of Five New Pulsars
• A Statistical Analysis of the Nulling Pulsar Population

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Green Bank North Celestial Cap Survey IX: Timing Follow-up for 128 Pulsars
• 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
• Constraining the selection corrected luminosity function and total pulse count for radio transients
• Revealing the Unseen: The Discovery of Long-Awaited Radiation from the Intermittent Pulsar PSR B1931+24