Non-symmetrical sparking may hint "zits'' on a pulsar surface
arXiv:2401.14181 · doi:10.1002/asna.20240010
Abstract
Pulsar electrodynamics could be relevant to the physics of stellar surface, which remains poorly understood for more than half a centenary and is difficult to probe due to the absence of direct and clear observational evidence. Nevertheless, highly-sensitive telescopes (e.g., China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, FAST) may play an essential role in solving the problem since the predicted surface condition would have quite different characteristics in some models of pulsar structure, especially after the establishment of the standard model of particle physics. For instance, small hills (or ``zit'') may exist on solid strangeon star surface with rigidity, preferential discharge, i.e., gap sparking, may occur around the hills in the polar cap region. In this work, with the 110-min polarization observation of PSR B0950+08 targeted by FAST, we report that the gap sparking is significantly non-symmetrical to the meridian plane on which the rotational and magnetic axes lie. It is then speculated that this asymmetry could be the result of preferential sparking around zits which might rise randomly on pulsar surface. Some polarization features of both single pulses and the mean pulse, as well as the cross-correlation function of different emission regions, have also been presented.
Accepted for publication in Astronomische Nachrichten
References in corpus (19)
- DSPSR: Digital Signal Processing Software for Pulsar Astronomy
- The Fundamental Performance of FAST with 19-beam Receiver at L Band
- Emission Beam Geometry of Selected Pulsars Derived from Average Pulse Polarization Data
- Evidence for alignment of the rotation and velocity vectors in pulsars
- Solid Quark Stars?
- Radio pulsars: already fifty years!
- Magnetospheric curvature radiation by bunches as emission mechanism for repeating fast radio bursts
- The superflares of soft Gamma-ray repeatres: giant quakes in solid quark stars?
- The main- interpulse interaction of PSR B1702-19
- Absolute Broadband Polarization Behaviour of PSR B0329+54: A Glimpse of the Core Emission Process
- Dual-frequency single-pulse study of PSR B0950+08
- Oscillation Driven Magnetospheric Activity In Pulsars
- Strong and weak pulsar radio emission due to thunderstorms and raindrops of particles in the magnetosphere
- The radio signal of PSR B0950+08 is detected over the whole pulse phase
- Neutron Star versus Neutral Star: On the 90th anniversary of Landau's publication in astrophysics
- 50 Years of Pulsars!
- A roadmap to strange star
- Repeating FRBs reveal the secret of pulsar magnetospheric activity
- Jiamusi pulsar observations: IV. The core-weak pattern of PSR B0329+54