The Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey - VI. Discovery and timing of 142 pulsars and a Galactic population analysis

By D. Lorimer, A. Faulkner, Andrew G. Lyne, R. Manchester, Michael Kramer, M. McLaughlin, G. Hobbs, A. Possenti, Ingrid Stairs, F. Camilo and 4 more. 2006

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We present the discovery and follow-up observations of 142 pulsars found in the Parkes 20-cm multibeam pulsar survey of the Galactic plane. These new discoveries bring the total number of pulsars found by the survey to 742. In addition to tabulating spin and astrometric parameters, along with pulse width and flux density information, we present orbital characteristics for 13 binary pulsars which form part of the new sample. Combining these results from another recent Parkes multibeam survey at high Galactic latitudes, we have a sample of 1008 normal pulsars which we use to carry out a determination of their Galactic distribution and birth rate. We infer a total Galactic population of 30 000 ± 1100 potentially detectable pulsars (i.e. those beaming towards us) having 1.4-GHz luminosities above 0.1 mJy kpc 2 . Adopting the Tauris & Manchester beaming model, this translates to a total of 155 000 ± 6000 active radio pulsars in the Galaxy above this luminosity limit. Using a pulsar current analysis, we derive the birth rate of this population to be 1.4 ± 0.2 pulsars per century. An important conclusion from our work is that the inferred radial density function of pulsars depends strongly on the assumed distribution of free electrons in the Galaxy. As a result, any analyses using the most recent electron model of Cordes & Lazio predict a dearth of pulsars in the inner Galaxy. We show that this model can also bias the inferred pulsar scaleheight with respect to the Galactic plane. Combining our results with other Parkes multibeam surveys we find that the population is best described by an exponential distribution with a scaleheight of 330 pc. Surveys underway at Parkes and Arecibo are expected to improve the knowledge of the radial distribution outside the solar circle, and to discover several hundred new pulsars in the inner Galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23b8915ab992df51a6708d25c3e382bf311cf6ad

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Citations in the corpus

THE SPECTRUM OF ISOTROPIC DIFFUSE GAMMA-RAY EMISSION BETWEEN 100 MeV AND 820 GeV (2014, methodology): “When combined with a model of the Galaxy rotation curve, the observed velocity can be converted into a measurement of Galactocentric radius, allowing for a determination of the gas density distribution along the line of sight.”
A NEW ELECTRON-DENSITY MODEL FOR ESTIMATION OF PULSAR AND FRB DISTANCES (2016, background): “In the next few years, the population of known pulsars increased significantly, mainly as a result of the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey; several groups (e.g., Lorimer et al. 2006) began to notice that NE2001 systematically underestimates the z-distance of high-latitude pulsars.”
Galactic synchrotron emission with cosmic ray propagation models (2013, methodology): “Also, our χ2 values of SUNE and SUNLorimE show that there is a preference for the Strong et al. (2010) over the Lorimer et al. (2006) CR distribution, mostly caused by the flatter CR distribution in the outer Galaxy.”
The pulsar spectral index distribution (2013, methodology): “The parameters were chosen to match the studies of Lorimer et al. (2006) and Faucher-Giguère & Kaspi (2006), who found that a log-normal luminosity distribution accurately describes the known population.”
The Milky Way’s Kiloparsec-Scale Wind: A Hybrid Cosmic-Ray and Thermally Driven Outflow (2007, methodology): “— Comparison of two different calculations of the pulsarpopulation as a function of Galactocentric radius (Lorimer et al. 2006)vs. the cosmic ray source density implied from the observedγ-ray emissivity (Strong et al. 2004).”
THE SPECTRUM AND MORPHOLOGY OF THE FERMI BUBBLES (2014, methodology): “The following parameters describe our baseline GALPROP model7: the CR population is traced by the measured pulsar distribution (Lorimer et al. 2006), the CR confinement volume has a height of 10 kpc and a radius of 20 kpc, and H I column densities are derived from the 21-cm line intensities in the…”
THE FIRST FERMI LAT SUPERNOVA REMNANT CATALOG (2015, methodology): “…are: • the CR source distribution, for which we adopted the distribution of SNRs according to Case & Bhattacharya (1998) and of pulsars according to Lorimer et al. (2006); • the height of the CR propagation halo, for which we adopted the values of 4 kpc and 10 kpc, the limits of the viable halo…”
Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data (2011, background): “The assumed spatial distribution is typically based on supernova remnant and pulsar surveys (e.g., Case & Bhattacharya, 1998; Lorimer et al., 2006).”
On the birthrates of Galactic neutron stars (2008, methodology): “A recent estimate of the birthrate and the number of radio pulsars in the Galaxy was performed by Lorimer et al. (2006) (L+06 from herein) using 1008 non-recyced pulsars detected in 1.4-GHz surveys using the Parkes telescope (the PMPS and the Parkes High-Latitude Survey).”
Spectral properties of 441 radio pulsars (2017, methodology): “23 are from Hobbs et al. (2004), four from Lorimer et al. (2006), two from Kramer et al. (2003) and one from Manchester et al. (2001), and all are based on the same flux density estimation method.”
Pulsar searches and timing with the square kilometre array (2009, methodology): “As discussed by Lorimer et al. (2006), we make the important distinction between the observed (i.e. post-detection) pulse width which is related to the pulsar’s intrinsic pulse width by the quadrature sum of contributions from sampling, dispersion smearing and scattering (see Eq.”
CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources (2019, background): “…∼3 kpc and falling off at larger radii (e.g., Yusifov & Küçük 2004; Faucher-Giguère & Kaspi 2006), and young pulsars and magnetars are concentrated heavily in the Galactic disk, with scale heights 0.33 kpc (e.g., Lorimer et al. 2006) and 0.02–0.03 kpc (Olausen & Kaspi 2014), respectively.”