Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-03T13:04:11.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are Giant Pulses Evidence of Self-Organized Criticality?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Matthew D. T. Young  and
Brian G. Kenny
Matthew D. T. Young
Affiliation:
The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, W.A. 6907, Australia
Brian G. Kenny
Affiliation:
The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, W.A. 6907, Australia

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The statistical distributions of certain giant pulse (GP) properties appear to be well described by power laws. This suggests that the emission mechanism that produces giant pulses is a scale-invariant one. In turn this may indicate that the source of the GPs is in a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). For a recent discussion of SOC see Sornette et al. (1995).

Prior to this conference, the only pulsars reported to exhibit GPs were the Crab pulsar, PSR B0531+21 (Lundgren et al. 1995), and the millisecond pulsar PSR B1937+21 (Cognard et al. 1996). However, at the conference it was reported that giant micropulses had recently been observed from PSR J0437–4715 (Ables and McConnell, this volume). In all cases the statistical distributions of observed GP heights and/or fluxes are found to be well described by simple power laws. The arguments in this note apply to all these pulsars.

Type
Part 3 Radio Emission Processes
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 160: Pulsars: Problems and Progress , 1996 , pp. 179 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996

References

Argyle, E. & Gower, J.F.R. 1972, ApJ, 175, L89 Google Scholar
Cognard, I., Shrauner, J.A., Taylor, J.H. & Thorsett, S.E. 1996, ApJ, 457, L81 Google Scholar
Lundgren, S.C., Cordes, J.M., Ulmer, M., Matz, S.M., Lomatch, S., Foster, R.S. & Hankins, T. 1995, ApJ, 453, 433 Google Scholar
Sornette, D., Johansen, A. & Dornie, I. 1995, J de Physique I, 5(3), 325 Google Scholar