Quantitative Agreement of Multiwavelength Pulsar Observations with the Spectrum of the Emission from a Rotating Faster-than-light Source Across Sixteen Orders of Magnitude of Frequency

Details Quantitative Agreement of Multiwavelength Pulsar Observations with the Spectrum of the Emission from a Rotating Faster-than-light Source Across Sixteen Orders of Magnitude of Frequency Quantitative Agreement of Multiwavelength Pulsar Observations with the Spectrum of the Emission from a Rotating Faster-than-light Source Across Sixteen Orders of Magnitude of Frequency

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21545325s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #453.25; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.466

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We compare the multiwavelength observations of 9 broad-band pulsars (Crab, Vela, Geminga, B0656+14, B1055-52, B1509-58, B1706-44, B1929+10, and B1951+32) with the spectrum of the radiation generated by an extended polarization current whose distribution pattern rotates faster than light in vacuo and show that the entire spectrum of each pulsar can be accounted for quantitatively in terms of this single emission process. Superluminal emission - a generalization of the synchrotron-Cerenkov process to a volume-distributed source in vacuum - gives rise to an oscillatory radiation spectrum. Thus, the bell-shaped peaks of pulsar spectra in the ultraviolet or X-ray bands (features that are normally interpreted as manifestations of thermal radiation) appear in the present model as higher-frequency maxima of the same oscillations that constitute the emission bands observed in the radio spectrum of the Crab pulsar. Likewise, the sudden steepening of the gradient of the spectrum by -1, which occurs around 1018 - 1021 Hz, appears as a universal feature of pulsar emission: a feature that reflects the transit of the position of the observer across the frequency-dependent Rayleigh distance. The results reported here are model-independent in that the only global property of the magnetospheric structure invoked is its quasi-steady time dependence: the cylindrical components jr,phi,z(r,phi,zt) of the density of the magnetospheric polarization current depend on phi only in the combination phi - omega*t. This property follows unambiguously from the observational data and implies that a current distribution with a superluminally rotating pattern at a radius r > c/omega is responsible for the unique features of pulsar emission such as the pulses' extreme brightness temperature, temporal width, source dimension and peak spectral frequency as well as the average pulses' polarization properties (their occurrence as concurrent 'orthogonal' modes with swinging position angles and with nearly 100 per cent linear or circular polarization).

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