Pulsar scintillation studies with LOFAR III. Annual variations in PSR~J0814$+$7429

Abstract

The interstellar scintillation observed in radio pulsars arises from interference between electromagnetic waves scattered by electron density fluctuations in the turbulent interstellar plasma, providing a critical tool for probing the small-scale structure of the ionized interstellar medium and the pulsar system itself. The primary aim of this work is to study long-term scintillation variations for a bright and nearby pulsar, PSR J0814$+$7429, carried out from 2013 September to 2023 September with the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR) High Band Antennae in the frequency range of 120 - 170 MHz. We derive the basic scintillation parameters, scintillation bandwidth ($\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{d}}$) and scintillation timescale ($\Delta {\tau }_{\mathrm{d}}$), from the two-dimensional (2D) auto-covariance function of the dynamic spectra that are a 2D matrix of pulse intensity as a function of time and frequency. We present the long-term monitoring of $\Delta {\nu }_{\mathrm{d}}$ and $\Delta {\tau }_{\mathrm{d}}$ for PSR J0814$+7429$, which shows a strong annual variation in the time series of the $\Delta {\tau }_{\mathrm{d}}$. From our modeling of the annual variations of scintillation velocities, the scattering screen is anisotropic and located at $0.23\pm 0.02$ kpc from the Earth, likely corresponding to the boundary of the Local Bubble.

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