Constraints on Undetected Long-Period Binaries in the Known Pulsar Population
arXiv:2305.03561 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/acd248
Abstract
Although neutron star-black hole binaries have been identified through mergers detected in gravitational waves, a pulsar-black hole binary has yet to be detected. While short-period binaries are detectable due to a clear signal in the pulsar's timing residuals, effects from a long-period binary could be masked by other timing effects, allowing them to go undetected. In particular, a long-period binary measured over a small subset of its orbital period could manifest via time derivatives of the spin-frequency incompatible with isolated pulsar properties. We assess the possibility of pulsars having unknown companions in long-period binaries and put constraints on the range of binary properties that may remain undetected in current data, but that may be detectable with further observations. We find that for 35% of canonical pulsars with published higher order derivatives, the precision of measurements is not enough to confidently reject binarity (period greater than ~2 kyr), and that a black-hole binary companion could not be ruled out for a sample of pulsars without published constraints if the period is greater than 1 kyr. While we find no convincing cases in the literature, we put more stringent limits on orbital period and longitude of periastron for the few pulsars with published higher-order frequency derivatives (n greater than 3). We discuss the detectability of candidates and find that a sample pulsar in a 100 yr orbit could be detectable within 5-10 yr.
9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to ApJ
References in corpus (20)
- GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M Black Hole with a 2.6 M Compact Object
- The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey: VI. Discovery and timing of 142 pulsars and a Galactic population analysis
- Assessing the Role of Spin Noise in the Precision Timing of Millisecond Pulsars
- Formation of millisecond pulsars with CO white dwarf companions - II. Accretion, spin-up, true ages and comparison to MSPs with He white dwarf companions
- New long-term braking index measurements for glitching pulsars using a glitch-template method
- Identifying and mitigating noise sources in precision pulsar timing data sets
- An X-ray quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the Large Magellanic Cloud
- Multiwavelength monitoring and X-ray brightening of Be X-ray binary PSR J2032+4127/MT91 213 on its approach to periastron
- The impact of glitches on young pulsar rotational evolution
- The UTMOST pulsar timing programme II: Timing noise across the pulsar population
- Two long-term intermittent pulsars discovered in the PALFA Survey
- Gaia pulsars and where to find them
- Why the braking indices of young pulsars are less than 3?
- A Highly Eccentric 3.9-Millisecond Binary Pulsar in the Globular Cluster NGC 6652
- Evidence for profile changes in PSR J1713+0747 using the uGMRT
- Pulsar Timing Errors from Asynchronous Multi-Frequency Sampling of Dispersion Measure Variations
- Wide binary companions to massive stars and their use in constraining natal kicks
- Stochastic processes for pulsar timing noise: fluctuations in the internal and external torques
- Pulsar timing noise and the minimum observation time to detect gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
- Determination of the orbital parameters of binary pulsars