Analysis of Multi-Hour Continuous Observations of Seven Millisecond Pulsars

TL;DR

This study analyzes multi-hour observations of seven millisecond pulsars to understand noise sources affecting pulsar timing, providing new measurements of scintillation properties and assessing the impact of various noise contributions on timing precision.

Contribution

It offers the first measurements of scintillation bandwidths and timescales for some MSPs, and evaluates the effects of jitter and DM variations on timing accuracy.

Findings

No DM variations observed on hour-long timescales.

Timing precision is unaffected by short-term TOA discontinuities.

TOA errors align with expected noise contributions.

Abstract

Precision pulsar timing can be used for a variety of astrophysical tests from the detection of gravitational waves to probing the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM). Here we present analyses of the noise contributions to pulsar timing residuals from continuous multi-hour observations of seven millisecond pulsars (MSPs). We present scintillation bandwidth measurements for all MSPs in the sample, some for the first time, and scintillation timescale measurements and lower limits for all MSPs for the first time. In addition, we present upper limits on the contribution of pulse phase jitter to the timing residual error for all MSPs. These long observations also allow us to constrain variations in dispersion measures (DMs) on hour-long timescales for several millisecond pulsars. We find that there are no apparent DM variations in any of the MSPs studied on these timescales as expected. In light of new radio telescopes such as the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), which will be able to time many pulsars for a short time each day, we search for differences in timing precisions from continuous TOAs and from equivalent length time-discontinuous TOAs. We find no differences in the precision for any MSP in our sample, as expected. We conclude that the TOA variations are consistent with the expected breakdown into template-fitting, jitter, and scintillation errors.