X-ray and Radio Timing of the Pulsar in 3C 58

TL;DR

This paper presents 6.4 years of timing data for PSR J0205+6449, revealing large glitches, developing a new X-ray timing method, and measuring phase offsets between radio and X-ray pulses, contributing to understanding pulsar emission mechanisms.

Contribution

Introduces a new unbinned maximum-likelihood method for X-ray pulse timing and provides the first phase offset measurement between radio and X-ray pulses for PSR J0205+6449.

Findings

Detected two large spin-up glitches in the pulsar.

Developed a superior unbinned maximum-likelihood timing technique.

Measured the radio to X-ray phase offset as 0.10±0.01.

Abstract

We present timing data spanning 6.4 yr for the young and energetic PSR J0205+6449, in the supernova remnant 3C 58. Data were obtained with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, the Jodrell Bank Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope. We present phase-coherent timing analyses showing timing noise and two spin-up glitches with fractional frequency increases of ~3.4E-7 near MJD 52555, and ~3.8E-6 between MJDs 52777 and 53062. These glitches are unusually large if the pulsar was created in the historical supernova in 1181 as has been suggested. For the X-ray timing we developed a new unbinned maximum-likelihood method for determining pulse arrival times which performs significantly better than the traditional binned techniques. In addition, we present an X-ray pulse profile analysis of four years of RXTE data showing that the pulsar is detected up to ~40 keV. We also present the first measurement of the phase offset between the radio and X-ray pulse for this source, showing that the radio pulse leads the X-ray pulse by phi=0.10+/-0.01 in phase. We compile all known measurements of the phase offsets between radio and X-ray and radio and gamma-ray pulses for X-ray and gamma-ray pulsars. We show that there is no relationship between pulse period and phase offset, supported by our measurement of the phase offset for PSR J0205+6449.