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Register a new userObservations of the Crab Pulsar with VERITAS
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Authors
A. McCann
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The Fermi space telescope has detected over 100 pulsars. These discoveries have ushered in a new era of pulsar astrophysics at gamma-ray energies. Gamma-ray pulsars, regardless of whether they are young, old, radio-quiet etc, all exhibit a seemingly unifying characteristic: a spectral energy distribution which takes the form of a power law with an exponential cut-off occurring between ~1 and ~10 GeV. The single known exception to this is the Crab pulsar, which was recently discovered to emit pulsed gamma rays at energies exceeding a few hundred GeV. Here we present an update on observations of the Crab pulsar above 100 GeV with VERITAS. We show some new results from a joint gamma-ray/radio observational campaign to search for a correlation between giant radio pulses and pulsed VHE emission from the Crab pulsar. We also present some preliminary results on Lorentz invariance violation tests performed using Fermi and VERITAS observations of the Crab pulsar.
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We report on the observations of the Crab pulsar with the MAGIC telesopes. Data were taken both in the mono-mode ($>25$ GeV) and in the stereo-mode ($>50$ GeV). Clear signals from the two peaks were detected with both modes and the phase resolved energy spectra were calculated. By comparing with the measurements done by Fermi-LAT, we found that the energy spectra of the Crab pulsar does not follow a power law with an exponential cutoff, but that it extends as a power law after the break at around 5 GeV. This suggests that the emission above 25 GeV is not dominated by the curvatura radiation, which is inconsistent with the standard prediction of the OG and SG models.
We observed the Crab pulsar in October 2008 at the Copernico Telescope in Asiago - Cima Ekar with the optical photon counter Aqueye (the Asiago Quantum Eye) which has the best temporal resolution and accuracy ever achieved in the optical domain (hundreds of picoseconds). Our goal was to perform a detailed analysis of the optical period and phase drift of the main peak of the Crab pulsar and compare it with the Jodrell Bank ephemerides. We determined the position of the main peak using the steepest zero of the cross-correlation function between the pulsar signal and an accurate optical template. The pulsar rotational period and period derivative have been measured with great accuracy using observations covering only a 2 day time interval. The error on the period is 1.7 ps, limited only by the statistical uncertainty. Both the rotational frequency and its first derivative are in agreement with those from the Jodrell Bank radio ephemerides archive. We also found evidence of the optical peak leading the radio one by ~230 microseconds. The distribution of phase-residuals of the whole dataset is slightly wider than that of a synthetic signal generated as a sequence of pulses distributed in time with the probability proportional to the pulse shape, such as the average count rate and background level are those of the Crab pulsar observed with Aqueye. The counting statistics and quality of the data allowed us to determine the pulsar period and period derivative with great accuracy in 2 days only. The time of arrival of the optical peak of the Crab pulsar leads the radio one in agreement with what recently reported in the literature. The distribution of the phase residuals can be approximated with a Gaussian and is consistent with being completely caused by photon noise (for the best data sets).
POLAR is a dedicated Gamma-Ray Burst polarimeter making use of Compton-scattering which took data from the second Chinese spacelab, the Tiangong-2 from September 2016 to April 2017. It has a wide Field of View of $sim6$ steradians and an effective area of $sim400 cm^2$ at 300 keV. These features make it one of the most sensitive instruments in its energy range (15-500 keV), and therefore capable of almost continuously monitoring persistent sources such as pulsars. Significant folded pulsation from both PSR B0531+21 (the Crab Pulsar) and PSR B1509-58 has been observed. Observations of the Crab Pulsar with POLAR have previously been used for phase-resolved spectroscopy of the Crab Pulsar to calibrate the instrumental responses of POLAR. In this work, we investigate a polarimetric joint-fitting method for observations of the Crab Pulsar with POLAR. Unlike a GRB observation with POLAR, the observations of the Crab Pulsar are complicated by multiple observational datasets during which the polarization plane rotates as well. So before fitting, we have to correct the modulation curves under different datasets, by taking into account the rotations of the Crab Pulsars relative position in the detctors local coordinate, and the changes of detector response in different datasets. Despite these difficulties and the low signal to background for such sources constraining, polarization measurements were possible with the POLAR data. We will present the methodology briefly, which could be applied to any wide FoV polarimeter, and polarization results of the Crab pulsar with POLAR. Finally, the inferred ability of pulsar detection with POLAR-2 (the successor of POLAR) will also be discussed.
The paper presents the timing and spectral analysis of several observations of the Crab pulsar performed with INTEGRAL in the energy range 3-500 keV. All these observations, when summed together provide a high statistics data set which can be used for accurate phase resolved spectroscopy. A detailed study of the pulsed emission at different phase intervals is performed. The spectral distribution changes with phase showing a characteristic reverse S shape of the photon index. Moreover the spectrum softens with energy, in each phase interval, and this behavior is adequately modeled over the whole energy range 3-500 keV with a single curved law with a slope variable with Log(E), confirming the BeppoSAX results on the curvature of the pulsed emission. The bending parameter of the log-parabolic model is compatible with a single value of 0.14+/-0.02 over all phase intervals. Results are discussed within the three-dimensional outer gap model.
We study the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the Crab Pulsar and its nearby knot in the optical and in the infrared (IR) regime. We present high-quality UBVRIz, as well as adaptive optics JHK_sL photometry, achieved under excellent conditions with the FORS1 and NAOS/CONICA instruments at the VLT. We combine these data with re-analyzed archival Spitzer Space Telescope data to construct a SED for the pulsar, and quantify the contamination from the knot. We have also gathered optical imaging data from 1988 to 2008 from several telescopes in order to examine the predicted secular decrease in luminosity. For the Crab Pulsar SED we find a spectral slope of alpha_nu = 0.27+-0.03 in the optical/near-IR regime, when we exclude the contribution from the knot. For the knot itself, we find a much redder slope of alpha_nu = -1.3 +- 0.1. Our best estimate of the average decrease in luminosity for the pulsar is 2.9+-1.6 mmag per year. We have demonstrated the importance of the nearby knot in precision measurements of the Crab Pulsar SED, in particular in the near-IR. We have scrutinized the evidence for the traditional view of a synchrotron self-absorption roll-over in the infrared, and find that these claims are unfounded. We also find evidence for a secular decrease in the optical light for the Crab Pulsar, in agreement with current pulsar spin-down models. However, although our measurements of the decrease significantly improve on previous investigations, the detection is still tentative. We finally point to future observations that can improve the situation significantly.
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