First results of the glitching pulsars monitoring program at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy

TL;DR

This paper presents initial findings from a systematic monitoring program of southern glitching pulsars at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy, including glitch detection, parameter measurement, and machine learning analysis of pulse behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a new monitoring program, reports on detected glitches, and applies machine learning techniques to analyze pulse data before and after glitches.

Findings

Detected a major glitch in Vela pulsar and smaller glitches in others.

Applied machine learning to analyze pulse data, finding no notable qualitative changes.

Confirmed recent glitches in two additional pulsars.

Abstract

We report here on the first results of a systematic monitoring of southern glitching pulsars at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy that started in the year 2019. We detected a major glitch in the Vela pulsar (PSR J0835$-$4510) and two small-glitches in PSR J1048$-$5832. For each glitch, we present the measurement of glitch parameters by fitting timing residuals. We then make an individual pulses study of Vela in observations before and after the glitch. We selected 6 days of observations around the major glitch on 2021 July 22 and study their statistical properties with machine learning techniques. We use Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) reconstruction of the pulses to separate them clearly from the noise. We perform a study with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) clustering techniques to search for unusual behavior of the clusters during the days around the glitch not finding notable qualitative changes. We have also detected and confirm recent glitches in PSR J0742$-$2822 and PSR J1740$-$3015.