pulsar population simulation obtained
looking fairly as expected! the big spike is almost certainly due to Terzan 5, we can't observe pulsars with luminosities lower than that in that cluster but it has 50ish pulsars that we can see so the distribution gets cut off hard at that point
at least, that's my interpretation.
ok double-checked my data and Terzan 5 has 39 pulsars with fluxes available in the literature (and thus, 39 pulsars in my dataset) with a cutoff at a log10 of 0.4, right where the spike starts
astronomy is cool
normally we name pulsars based on their co-ordinates in the sky, but globular clusters are relatively small so all those Terzan 5 pulsars would have the same name (J1748-2446). Since we don't want that, we decided to put letters based on order of discovery, so the first one is J1748-2446A, second is J1748-2446B, and so on
but there are 48. there are only 26 letters.
J1748-2446aa! J1748-2446ab! J1748-2446ac!
all the way down to J1748-2446ax (so far). what my analysis is saying is that there should be MANY more that are too dim to see.