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6th of May 2021
The Location of the Young Pulsar PSR J0837-2454
by Pol et al.
The pulsar PSR J0837–2454 was discovered with the Parkes telescope as part of the High Time Resolution Universe (HTRU) intermediate- latitude survey. The pulsar has a 629ms period and a characteristic age of 28.6 kyr. Based on its high galactic latitude, of almost 10 degrees, and its dispersion measure (DM = 143 pc cm−3), the pulsar appears to be at a height of >1 kiloparsec (>3260 light years) above the Galactic plane, but near the edge of our Galaxy. This is many times the observed scale height of the canonical pulsar population, which suggested this pulsar may have been born far out of the plane. A faint counterpart to the pulsar was detected by Pol et al. in follow-up imaging with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), and also a co-located, large low-surface-brightness region in archival Galactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA Survey data. Revised distance estimates based on these two detections come out to < 1 kpc, much smaller than the distances predicted by the dispersion measure, and place the pulsar much closer to the plane of the Galaxy. The 1-3 GHz ATCA image above was produced using uniform weighting in the deconvolution process, which is best suited for identifying point sources in the field of view. The pulsar PSR J0837–2454 is weakly visible at the center of the image. These results were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.



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