PSR J1453+1902 and the radio luminosities of solitary versus binary millisecond pulsars

TL;DR

This study presents timing observations of PSR J1453+1902, analyzes the luminosity distributions of solitary and binary millisecond pulsars, and finds no significant differences, suggesting a single homogeneous population.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed timing analysis of PSR J1453+1902 and revisits the luminosity comparison between solitary and binary millisecond pulsars, correcting previous misconceptions.

Findings

PSR J1453+1902 is a solitary millisecond pulsar with typical transverse velocity.

No significant luminosity differences are found between solitary and binary MSPs at 1400 MHz.

Luminosity distributions are consistent with a single population, not separate groups.

Abstract

We present 3 yr of timing observations for PSR J1453+1902, a 5.79-ms pulsar discovered during a 430-MHz drift-scan survey with the Arecibo telescope. Our observations show that PSR J1453+1902 is solitary and has a proper motion of 8(2) mas/yr. At the nominal distance of 1.2 kpc estimated from the pulsar's dispersion measure, this corresponds to a transverse speed of 46(11) km/s, typical of the millisecond pulsar population. We analyse the current sample of 55 millisecond pulsars in the Galactic disk and revisit the question of whether the luminosities of isolated millisecond pulsars are different from their binary counterparts. We demonstrate that the apparent differences in the luminosity distributions seen in samples selected from 430-MHz surveys can be explained by small-number statistics and observational selection biases. An examination of the sample from 1400-MHz surveys shows no differences in the distributions. The simplest conclusion from the current data is that the spin, kinematic, spatial and luminosity distributions of isolated and binary millisecond pulsars are consistent with a single homogeneous population.