The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey - VII. Timing of four millisecond pulsars and the underlying spin-period distribution of the Galactic millisecond pulsar population
Date Issued
2015
Author(s)
Lorimer, D. R.
•
Esposito, P.
•
Manchester, R. N.
•
•
Lyne, A. G.
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McLaughlin, M. A.
•
Kramer, M.
•
Hobbs, G.
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Stairs, I. H.
•
•
Eatough, R. P.
•
Keith, M. J.
•
Faulkner, A. J.
•
Camilo, F.
•
•
Crawford, F.
•
Description
The Parkes radio telescope is part of the Australia Telescope which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. DRL acknowledges support from the Royal Society as a University Research Fellow during the early phases of this project. DRL and MAM acknowledge support from Oxford Astrophysics while on sabbatical leave in 2013. PE acknowledges a Fulbright Research Scholar grant administered by the US–Italy Fulbright Commission and is grateful to the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for hosting him during his Fulbright exchange. The Fulbright Scholar Program is sponsored by the US Department of State and administered by CIES, a division of IIE. Pulsar Research at UBC is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant. Current support to DRL and MAM is provided by the National Science Foundation PIRE award 0968296. DRL thanks Joris Verbiest for useful discussions and to Simon Johnston and the CSIRO staff for their hospitality during the final stages of this work. We thank the referee for useful comments on the originally submitted version of this paper.
Abstract
We present timing observations of 4-ms pulsars discovered in the Parkes 20-cm multibeam pulsar survey of the Galactic plane. PSRs J1552-4937 and J1843-1448 are isolated objects with spin periods of 6.28 and 5.47 ms, respectively. PSR J1727-2946 is in a 40-d binary orbit and has a spin period of 27 ms. The 4.43-ms pulsar J1813-2621 is in a circular 8.16-d binary orbit around a low-mass companion star with a minimum companion mass of 0.2 M☉. Combining these results with detections from five other Parkes multibeam surveys, gives a well-defined sample of 56 pulsars with spin periods below 20 ms. We develop a likelihood analysis to constrain the functional form which best describes the underlying distribution of spin periods for millisecond pulsars. The best results were obtained with a lognormal distribution. A gamma distribution is less favoured, but still compatible with the observations. Uniform, power-law and Gaussian distributions are found to be inconsistent with the data. Galactic millisecond pulsars being found by current surveys appear to be in agreement with a lognormal distribution which allows for the existence of pulsars with periods below 1.5 ms.
Volume
450
Issue
2
Start page
2185
Issn Identifier
0035-8711
Ads BibCode
2015MNRAS.450.2185L
Rights
open.access
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