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Lewandowska, Natalia
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2025
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Quest2025_070.pdf
Adobe PDF, 378.87 KB
Research Projects
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This research project is focused on the millisecond pulsar PSR J1909-3744, the most precisely timed pulsar in pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments. Recently, the pulsar showed a change in its average emission, switching from a strong to a weak emission mode, during an exceptionally bright scintillation event. Past observations indicate that the weak emission mode arrives 9.26 ± 3.94 μs earlier than the strong emission mode (Miles et al. 2022). Additionally, they provided a new value of jitter noise (8.20 ± 0.14 ns per hour) for this pulsar. These findings have implications for improving pulsar timing models, which are crucial for enhancing the sensitivity of gravitational wave background searches, as well as the overall impact of similar timing improvements on PTA pulsars. The goal of this research project is to examine the pulsar's average emission and single pulses and extract the respective arrival times to search for indicators of emission mode changes. The applied methods include the extraction of single pulse arrival times using algorithms resulting from the pulsar software package PSRCHIVE and the calculation of phases of occurrence, intensity, fluences, pulse shapes, and equivalent pulse widths using existing Python scripts.