Interstellar Scintillation of PSR J0437-4715

Abstract

We studied the turbulence spectrum of the local interstellar plasma in the direction of PSR J0437-4715, on the basis of our observations and those reported earlier by others. We combine these data to form a structure function for the variations of phase along the line of sight to the pulsar. For observations that did not report them, we infer modulation indices from a theoretical model. We find that all of the observations fit a power-law spectrum of turbulence with index n=3.46+/-0.20. We suggest that differences among reported values for scintillation bandwidth and timescale for this pulsar arise from differences in observing parameters. We suggest that refractive effects dominate for this line of sight, with refraction angle about twice the diffraction angle at 330 MHz observing frequency. We suggest that the scattering of this pulsar lies in a layer of enhanced turbulence, about 10 pc from the Sun. We propose that the flux variations of the extragalactic source PKS 0405-385 arise in the same scattering layer.

9 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (6)

• A test of general relativity from the three-dimensional orbital geometry of a binary pulsar
• Interstellar scintillation as the origin of rapid radio variability in the quasar J1819+3845
• Long-Term Scintillation Studies of Pulsars: I. Observations and Basic Results
• Interstellar Scintillation of the Polarized Flux Density in Quasar, PKS 0405-385
• Levy model for interstellar scintillations
• Interstellar Scintillation of PSR J0437-4715 on Two Scales

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Astrophysical gyrokinetics: kinetic and fluid turbulent cascades in magnetized weakly collisional plasmas
• The Structure of the Local Interstellar Medium V: Electron Densities
• Dispersion Measure Variations and their Effect on Precision Pulsar Timing
• On weak and strong magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Numerical Measurements of the Spectrum in Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence
• RadioAstron Studies of the Nearby, Turbulent Interstellar Plasma With the Longest Space-Ground Interferometer Baseline
• The low-frequency characteristics of PSR J0437-4715 observed with the Murchison Widefield Array
• Interstellar scintillations of PSR B1919+21: space-ground interferometry
• Interstellar Plasma Turbulence Spectrum Toward the Pulsars PSR B0809+74 and B0950+08
• Interstellar Scintillation of PSR J0437-4715 on Two Scales
• PSR J0437-4715: The Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy 2019-2020 Observational Campaign