| 17th of February 2017 |
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| Pulsar braking and the P-Pdot diagram |
| by Simon Johnston (CASS) |
| In a paper recently accepted by MNRAS
Johnston & Karastergiou
look at how pulsars evolve with time. It is well known that pulsars spin down
as they age, however, the precise form of this spindown is not understood.
Evolutionary tracks can be made on the P-Pdot diagram as shown in the Figure.
Here, the points represent the known pulsars with the red lines denoted
possible evolutionary paths from a birth point in the top left of the diagram.
The paper concludes that the evolution of the magnetic axis towards the spin axis plays a critical role in the evolution and that there are many less pulsars in our Galaxy than previously thought. |