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    Robust estimation of scattering in pulsar timing analysis

    Access Status
    Fulltext not available
    Authors
    Lentati, L.
    Kerr, M.
    Dai, S.
    Shannon, Ryan
    Hobbs, G.
    Oslowski, S.
    Date
    2017
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
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    Citation
    Lentati, L. and Kerr, M. and Dai, S. and Shannon, R. and Hobbs, G. and Oslowski, S. 2017. Robust estimation of scattering in pulsar timing analysis. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 468 (2): pp. 1474-1485.
    Source Title
    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
    DOI
    10.1093/mnras/stx580
    ISSN
    0035-8711
    School
    Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (Physics)
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/53556
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    We present a robust approach to incorporating models for the time-variable broadening of the pulse profile due to scattering in the ionized interstellar medium into profile-domain pulsar timing analysis. We use this approach to simultaneously estimate temporal variations in both the dispersion measure (DM) and scattering, together with a model for the pulse profile that includes smooth evolution as a function of frequency, and the pulsar's timing model. We show that fixing the scattering time-scales when forming time-of-arrival estimates, as has been suggested in the context of traditional pulsar timing analysis, can significantly underestimate the uncertainties in both DM and the arrival time of the pulse, leading to bias in the timing parameters. We apply our method using a new, publicly available, GPU-accelerated code, both to simulations and observations of the millisecond pulsar PSR J1643−1224. This pulsar is known to exhibit significant scattering variability compared to typical millisecond pulsars, and we find including low-frequency (<1 GHz) data without a model for these scattering variations leads to significant periodic structure in the DM, and also biases the astrometric parameters at the 4σ level, for example, changing proper motion in right ascension by 0.50 ± 0.12. If low-frequency observations are to be included when significant scattering variations are present, we conclude it is necessary to not just model those variations, but also to sample the parameters that describe the variations simultaneously with all other parameters in the model, a task for which profile domain pulsar timing is ideally suited.

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