Journal article

Effects of periodicity in observation scheduling on parameter estimation of pulsar glitches

L Dunn, ME Lower, A Melatos

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2021

Abstract

In certain pulsar timing experiments, where observations are scheduled approximately periodically (e.g. daily), timing models with significantly different frequencies (including but not limited to glitch models with different frequency increments) return near-equivalent timing residuals. The average scheduling aperiodicity divided by the phase error due to time-of-arrival uncertainties is a useful indicator when the degeneracy is important. Synthetic data are used to explore the effect of this degeneracy systematically. It is found that phase-coherent tempo2 or temponest-based approaches are biased sometimes towards reporting small glitch sizes regardless of the true glitch size. Local estim..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)


Awarded by Australian Research Council


Awarded by Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship


Funding Acknowledgements

Parts of this research are supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) (project number CE170100004) and Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170103625. LD is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and by the Rowden White Scholarship. MEL receives support from the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship FL15010014 and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Astronomy and Space Science. The authors are grateful to Bill Moran, Rob Evans, and especially Sofia Suvorova for work on the HMM and useful discussions. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous referee for their helpful comments.