Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 872, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab01fd
Keywords
ISM: structure; pulsars: general; solar wind
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center award [1430284]
- NSF [AST-1100968]
- Simons Foundation
- NSERC Discovery Grant
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has observed dozens of millisecond pulsars for over a decade. We have accrued a large collection of dispersion measure (DM) measurements sensitive to the total electron content between Earth and the pulsars at each observation. All lines of sight cross through the solar wind (SW), which produces correlated DM fluctuations in all pulsars. We develop and apply techniques for extracting the imprint of the SW from the full collection of DM measurements in the recently released NANOGrav 11 yr data set. We filter out long-timescale DM fluctuations attributable to structure in the interstellar medium and carry out a simultaneous analysis of all pulsars in our sample that can differentiate the correlated signature of the wind from signals unique to individual lines of sight. When treating the SW as spherically symmetric and constant in time, we find the electron number density at 1 au to be 7.9 +/- 0.2 cm(-3). We find our data to be insensitive to long-term variation in the density of the wind. We argue that our techniques paired with a high-cadence, low-radio-frequency observing campaign of near-ecliptic pulsars would be capable of mapping out large-scale latitudinal structure in the wind.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available