Do Pulsar and Fast Radio Burst dispersion measures obey Benford's law?

TL;DR

This study tests whether the dispersion measures of pulsars and FRBs follow Benford's law and finds significant deviations, indicating they do not obey this statistical distribution.

Contribution

The paper provides the first analysis of dispersion measures against Benford's law for pulsars and FRBs, revealing notable discrepancies.

Findings

Dispersion measures significantly deviate from Benford's law

Chi-squared value close to 80 indicates strong disagreement

Discrepancy corresponds to about 7 sigma

Abstract

We check if the first significant digit of the dispersion measure of pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (using the CHIME catalog) is consistent with the Benford distribution. We find a large disagreement with Benford's law with $\chi^2$ close to 80 for 8 degrees of freedom for both these aforementioned datasets. This corresponds to a discrepancy of about 7$\sigma$. Therefore, we conclude that the dispersion measures of pulsars and FRBs do not obey Benford's law.