ASSESSING THE ROLE OF SPIN NOISE IN THE PRECISION TIMING OF MILLISECOND PULSARS

By R. Shannon, Jim Cordes. 2010

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We investigate rotational spin noise (referred to as timing noise) in non-accreting pulsars: millisecond pulsars, canonical pulsars, and magnetars. Particular attention is placed on quantifying the strength and non-stationarity of timing noise in millisecond pulsars because the long-term stability of these objects is required to detect nanohertz gravitational radiation. We show that a single scaling law is sufficient to characterize timing noise in millisecond and canonical pulsars while the same scaling law underestimates the levels of timing noise in magnetars. The scaling law, along with a detailed study of the millisecond pulsar B1937+21, leads us to conclude that timing noise is latent in most millisecond pulsars and will be measurable in many objects when better arrival time estimates are obtained over long data spans. The sensitivity of a pulsar timing array to gravitational radiation is strongly affected by any timing noise. We conclude that detection of proposed gravitational wave backgrounds will require the analysis of more objects than previously suggested over data spans that depend on the spectra of both the gravitational wave background and of the timing noise. It is imperative to find additional millisecond pulsars in current and future surveys in order to reduce the effects of timing noise.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5edd45246fc5decac5de45c36531b124f0ab183f

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Citations in the corpus

European Pulsar Timing Array Limits On An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (2015, background): “…between the GW signal of interest, and other sources of noise in the data, such as the intrinsic spin-noise due to rotational irregularities (e.g. Shannon & Cordes 2010), or delays in the pulse arrival time due to propagation through the interstellar medium (ISM) (e.g. Keith et al. 2013).”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, background): “…by C alifornia Institute of Technology user on 24 June 2019 in the apparent pulsar rotation rate (known as timing noise; Shannon & Cordes 2010), and other unmodelled effects such as those of gravitational waves (GWs), errors in the assumed time standard, and errors…”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, background): “Comparison of the observed rms timing residuals for the extended data sets with the ‘CP+MSP’ model of Shannon & Cordes (2010) gives similar results with those for the PPTA data sets discussed in Section 4.5.”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, background): “This is particularly so if predictions of steepspectrum timing noise in MSPs hold true (Shannon & Cordes 2010).”
Gravitational wave astronomy of single sources with a pulsar timing array (2011, background): “Several authors have modeled the statistics of red noise (Foster & Backer 1990; Cordes & Shannon 2010; Shannon & Cordes 2010), while some works show the potential of improving timing accuracy by introducing corrections to interstellar medium effects (Hemberger & Stinebring 2008; Demorest 2010).”
THE NANOGRAV NINE-YEAR DATA SET: OBSERVATIONS, ARRIVAL TIME MEASUREMENTS, AND ANALYSIS OF 37 MILLISECOND PULSARS (2015, result): “PSR B1937+21 displays the strongest red noise in our sample, consistent with previous work that shows a large amount of red noise (e.g., Shannon & Cordes 2010; Shannon et al. 2013).”
The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, methodology): “…issue is that 45 Random walks in pulsar phase, period, and period derivative lead to underlying power spectral indices of −2, −4, and −6, respectively (Shannon & Cordes 2010). portions of the NG9 data set only contained observations from a single receiver, inhibiting correction for time-variable…”