8akesale
@8akesale

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.


8akesale
@8akesale

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


8akesale
@8akesale

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.



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in reply to @8akesale's post:

that is wild! my first instinct here was that maybe there's systemic uncertainty in the luminosity caused by the distance measurement. that doesn't make much sense though, since it already has an exceptional population of pulsars + GCs tend to have reliable distances.

I looked it up and apparently it has specifically a lot of millisecond pulsars, so there has to be some heavy recycling going on there. weird damn cluster.

most pulsars in globular clusters are MSPs! pretty much every pulsar in my dataset is one. and yeah, our best guess is due to all the stellar interactions in their cores. HOWEVER my analysis shows that there's a very weak correlation, if any, between number of pulsars and core density. Terzan 5 is just weird!

hmm-hm! yeah it makes sense that the stellar density of GCs would lead to a bunch of x-ray binaries, and since they're pretty short-lived you'd end up with a lot of recycled MSPs. terzan 5 is really is just messed up.