1. Long-term scintillation studies of EPTA pulsars I. Observations and basic results
- Author
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Yulan Liu, Joris P. W. Verbiest, Robert A. Main, Ziwei Wu, Krishnakumar Moochickal Ambalappat, David J. Champion, Ismaël Cognard, Lucas Guillemot, Madhuri Gaikwad, Gemma H. Janssen, Michael Kramer, Michael J. Keith, Ramesh Karuppusamy, Lars Künkel, Kuo Liu, James W. McKee, Mitchell B. Mickaliger, Ben W. Stappers, Golam. M. Shaifullah, Gilles Theureau, Liu, Y, Verbiest, J, Main, R, Wu, Z, Ambalappat, K, Champion, D, Cognard, I, Guillemot, L, Gaikwad, M, Janssen, G, Kramer, M, Keith, M, Karuppusamy, R, Künkel, L, Liu, K, Mckee, J, Mickaliger, M, Stappers, B, Shaifullah, G, and Theureau, G
- Subjects
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) ,Space and Planetary Science ,Astronomy ,pulsars: general ,Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,ISM: general - Abstract
Interstellar scintillation analysis of pulsars allows us to probe the small-scale distribution and inhomogeneities of the ionized interstellar medium. Our priority is to present the data set and the basic measurements of scintillation parameters of pulsars employing long-term scintillation observations carried out from 2011 January to 2020 August by the European Pulsar Timing Array radio telescopes in the 21-cm and 11-cm bands. Additionally, we aim to identify future possible lines of study using this long-term scintillation dataset. We present the long-term time series of $\nu_{\rm d}$ and $\tau_{\rm d}$ for 13 pulsars. Sanity-checks and comparisons indicate that the scintillation parameters of our work and previously published works are mostly consistent. For two pulsars, PSRs~J1857+0943 and J1939+2134, we were able to obtain measurements of the $\nu_{\rm d}$ at both bands, which allows us to derive the time series of frequency scaling indices with a mean and a standard deviation of 2.82$\pm$1.95 and 3.18$\pm$0.60, respectively. We found some interesting features which will be studied in more detail in subsequent papers in this series: (i) in the time series of PSR~J1939+2134, where the scintillation bandwidth sharply increases or decreases associated with a sharp change of dispersion measure; (ii) PSR~J0613$-$0200 and PSR~J0636+5126 show a strong annual variation in the time series of the $\tau_{\rm d}$; (iii) PSR~J1939+2134 shows a weak anti-correlation between scintillation timescale and dispersion in WSRT data., Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in A&A
- Published
- 2022