Search for Differences between Radio-loud and Radio-quiet Gamma-Ray Pulsar Populations with Fermi-LAT Data
Abstract
Observations by the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) have enabled us to explore the population of non-recycled gamma-ray pulsars with a set of 112 objects. It was recently noted that there are apparent differences in the properties of radio-quiet and radio-loud subsets. In particular, the average observed radio-loud pulsar is younger than the average radio-quiet one and is located at lower Galactic latitude. Even so, the analysis based on the full list of pulsars may suffer from selection effects. Namely, most radio-loud pulsars are first discovered in the radio band, while radio-quiet ones are found using the gamma-ray data. In this work we perform a blind search for gamma-ray pulsars using the Fermi-LAT data alone, using all point sources from the 3FGL catalog as the candidates. Unlike our previous work, the present catalog is constructed with a semi-coherent method based on the time-differencing technique and covers the full range of characteristic ages down to 1 kyr. The search resulted in a catalog of 40 non-recycled pulsars, 25 of which are radio-quiet. All pulsars found in the search were previously known gamma-ray pulsars. We find no statistically significant differences in age or in distributions in Galactic latitude for the radio-loud and radio-quiet pulsars, while the distributions in rotation period are marginally different with a statistical probability of 4× {10}-3. The fraction of radio-quiet pulsars is estimated as {ɛ }{RQ}=(63+/- 8) % . The results are in agreement with the predictions of the outer magnetosphere models, while the polar cap models are disfavored.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/833/2/271
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1601.00330
- Bibcode:
- 2016ApJ...833..271S
- Keywords:
-
- gamma rays: stars;
- pulsars: general;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
- E-Print:
- 6 pages, 7 figures