The 1997 periastron passage of the binary pulsar PSR B1259-63

Abstract

We report here on multifrequency radio observations of the pulsed emission from PSR B1259-63 around the time of the closest approach to its B2e companion star. There was a general increase in the pulsar's dispersion measure and scatter broadening, and a decrease in the flux density towards periastron although changes in these parameters were seen on timescales as short as minutes. The pulsed emission disappeared 16 days prior to periastron and remained undetectable until 16 days after periastron. The observations are used to determine the parameters of the wind from the Be star. We show that a simple model, in which the wind density varies with radius as r^-2, provides a good fit to the data. The wind is clumpy with size scales <= 10^10 cm, densities of 10^6 cm^-3 and a velocity of 2000 km/s at a distance of 20 - 50 stellar radii. We find a correlation between dispersion measure variations and the pulse scattering times, suggesting that the same electrons are responsible for both effects.

5 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to the black hole at MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• Hyperstrong Radio-Wave Scattering in the Galactic Center. II. A Likelihood Analysis of Free Electrons in the Galactic Center
• X-Ray/Gamma-Ray Observations of the PSR B1259-63/SS 2883 system near Apastron
• Origin of the transient unpulsed radio emission from the PSR B1259-63 binary system
• Diffractive Scintillation of the Pulsar PSR B1259-63

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• Modeling the Wind of the Be Star SS 2883
• Modelling of the radio spectrum evolution in the binary pulsar B1259$-$63
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