Consecutive Bright Pulses in the Vela Pulsar

TL;DR

This study reports the discovery of consecutive bright radio pulses in the Vela pulsar, revealing a long-lived emission process that challenges the assumption of independent pulse events and enhances understanding of pulsar emission mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper presents the first observation of consecutive bright pulses in the Vela pulsar, indicating a long-lived emission process not previously documented.

Findings

Consecutive bright pulses occur more frequently than random chance predicts.

Bright pulses can last between 0.4 and 0.6 seconds.

Multiple groups of consecutive bright pulses were observed.

Abstract

We report on the discovery of consecutive bright radio pulses from the Vela pulsar, a new phenomenon that may lead to a greater understanding of the pulsar emission mechanism. This results from a total of 345 hr worth of observations of the Vela pulsar using the University of Tasmania's 26 m radio telescope to study the frequency and statistics of abnormally bright pulses and sub-pulses. The bright pulses show a tendency to appear consecutively. The observations found two groups of six consecutive bright pulses and many groups of two to five bright pulses in a row. The strong radio emission process that produces the six bright pulses lasts between 0.4 and 0.6 s. The numbers of bright pulses in sequence far exceed what would be expected if individual bright pulses were independent random events. Consecutive bright pulses must be generated by an emission process that is long lived relative to the rotation period of the neutron star.