Timing and Single-pulse Study of Pulsar J1909+0122 Discovered by CRAFTS

Abstract

Abstract We report the discovery of PSR J1909+0122 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) as part of the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey. PSR J1909+0122 has a spin period of 1.257 s and a dispersion measure of 186.2 pc cm−3. The averaged pulse profile shows two distinct components. We performed a single-pulse study based on a one-hour observation at 1.25 GHz on 2021 August 23. We used a threshold of 5σ ep to measure the nulling fraction (NF) as 63% ± 1.5%. The longitude-resolved fluctuation spectra and fast Fourier transform spectra of the binary sequences revealed the quasi-periodicity of nulling with a period of 30 rotation periods. We examined the reliability of the periodicity by comparing it to random noise injection. The NF, E ̇ , and modulation periodicity P M of PSR J1909+0122 were compared with other periodic nulling pulsars, showing that the source of J1909+0122 has the second largest NF in the population. Long-term timing observations over six months were used to derive the phase-connected ephemeris of this pulsar. The measured P and P ̇ values disfavor dipolar geometry for polar gap models, and the prediction for a space-charge-limited flow model in the case of inverse Compton scattering is only just above the death line. In this work, PSR J1909+0122 has revealed possible correlations between nulling behavior and pulsar properties, which will help to shed light on the pulsar emission mechanism and its temporal evolution in future observations.