| Description: | Today we present a daily image with one of the highest information densities ever; but you can also just enjoy the shapes and colors. These figures describe our observations and modelling of a "bi-drifting pulsar". These are a special class of pulsar that, we think, tells us something about how and why pulsars shine so brightly. In many pulsars, the individual burst appear to have a certain kind of underlying rhythm, that we call subpulse drift. In only a handful of pulsars, out of the total of about 3000, there are two rhytms operating in opposite directions. Very strange. For a recent paper, we studied one of these bi-drifting pulsars, B1839-04. The observed subpulse drift direction in the two leading pulse components is opposite from that in the two trailing components. Compared to work we did before https://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20171004), this time the analysis has been expanded with single pulse modeling, which allowed to explore electric potential variation at the polar cap. Furthermore, more general studies of pulsar geometry show that a low ratio of impact factor to the opening angle increases the likelihood of bi-drifting. Please enjoy the figure collage, if you are interested you can find the paper here: arXiv:2005.05643. PS: Hurray for the red, white and blue. |
