Gamma-ray astronomy

Abstract:

The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole leads to a short-lived thermal flare. Despite extensive searches, radio follow-up observations of known thermal stellar tidal disruption flares (TDFs) have not yet produced a conclusive detection. We present a detection of variable radio emission from a thermal TDF, which we interpret as originating from a newly launched jet. The multiwavelength properties of the source present a natural analogy with accretion-state changes of stellar mass black holes, which suggests that all TDFs could be accompanied by a jet. In the rest frame of the TDF, our radio observations are an order of magnitude more sensitive than nearly all previous upper limits, explaining how these jets, if common, could thus far have escaped detection.

Abstract:

Pulsars are known to display short-term variability. Recently, examples of longer term emission variability have emerged that are often correlated with changes in the rotational properties of the pulsar. To further illuminate this relationship, we have developed techniques to identify emission and rotation variability in pulsar data, and determine correlations between the two. Individual observations may be too noisy to identify subtle changes in the pulse profile. We use Gaussian process (GP) regression to model noisy observations and produce a continuous map of pulse profile variability. Generally, multiple observing epochs are required to obtain the pulsar spin frequency derivative (ν). GP regression is, therefore, also used to obtain ν, under the hypothesis that pulsar timing noise is primarily caused by unmodelled changes in ν. Our techniques distinguish between two types of variability: changes in the total flux density versus changes in the pulse shape. We have applied these techniques to 168 pulsars observed by the Parkes radio telescope, and see that although variations in flux density are ubiquitous, substantial changes in the shape of the pulse profile are rare.We reproduce previously published results and present examples of profile shape changing in seven pulsars; in particular, a clear new example of correlated changes in profile shape and rotation is found in PSR J1602-5100. In the shape changing pulsars, a more complex picture than the previously proposed two state model emerges. We conclude that our simple assumption that all timing noise can be interpreted as ν variability is insufficient to explain our data set.