Enhanced x-ray emission coinciding with giant radio pulses from the Crab Pulsar

Creators: Enoto, Teruaki; Terasawa, Toshio; Kisaka, Shota; Hu, Chin-Ping; Guillot, Sebastien; Lewandowska, Natalia; Malacaria, Christian; Ray, Paul S.; Ho, Wynn C. G.; Harding, Alice K.; Okajima, Takashi; Arzoumanian, Zaven; Gendreau, Keith C.; Wadiasingh, Zorawar; Markwardt, Craig B.; Soong, Yang; Kenyon, Steve; Bogdanov, Slavko; Majid, Walid A.; Güver, Tolga; Jaisawal, Gaurava K.; Foster, Rick; Murata, Yasuhiro; Takeuchi, Hiroshi; Takefuji, Kazuhiro; Sekido, Mamoru; Yonekura, Yoshinori; Misawa, Hiroaki; Tsuchiya, Fuminori; Aoki, Takahiko; Tokumaru, Munetoshi; Honma, Mareki; Kameya, Osamu; Oyama, Tomoaki; Asano, Katsuaki; Shibata, Shinpei; Tanaka, Shuta J.

Abstract

Giant radio pulses (GRPs) are sporadic bursts emitted by some pulsars that last a few microseconds and are hundreds to thousands of times brighter than regular pulses from these sources. The only GRP-associated emission outside of radio wavelengths is from the Crab Pulsar, where optical emission is enhanced by a few percentage points during GRPs. We observed the Crab Pulsar simultaneously at x-ray and radio wavelengths, finding enhancement of the x-ray emission by 3.8 ± 0.7% (a 5.4σ detection) coinciding with GRPs. This implies that the total emitted energy from GRPs is tens to hundreds of times higher than previously known. We discuss the implications for the pulsar emission mechanism and extragalactic fast radio bursts.

Additional Information

© 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License. Received 23 June 2020; accepted 5 March 2021. We thank Y. Terada and N. Kawai for suggestions on our analysis and manuscript; the Usuda 64-m antenna operation support team in Space Tracking and Communication Center and ISAS, JAXA for coordinating simultaneous observations with NICER; and E. Kawai and S. Hasegawa of the Space Time Standard Laboratory of the Kashima Space Technology Center of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) for supporting observations with the Kashima 34-m antenna. NICER analysis software and data calibration were provided by the NASA NICER mission and the Astrophysics Explorers Program. T.E., T.T., H.M., K.A., M.H., S.S., S.J.T., and S.K. are supported by JSPS/MEXT KAKENHI grant nos. 15H00845, 15K05069, 16H02198, 17H01116, 17K18270, 17K18776, 18H01245, 18H01246, 18H04584, and 19K14712. T.E. acknowledges Hakubi projects of Kyoto University and RIKEN. W.C.G.H. acknowledges support through grant no. 80NSSC20K0278 from NASA. C.H. was supported as the JSPS International Research Fellow (ID: P18318) and by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan through grant no. MOST 109-2112-M-018-009-MY3. C.M. is supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Marshall Space Flight Center, administered by Universities Space Research Association under contract with NASA. H.T. was supported by the discretionary expenses of the director of Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), JAXA. W.A.M performed research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the NASA. Author contributions: T.E. and T.T. led this radio-x-ray collaboration. T.T. and C.H. led the radio and x-ray timing analyses, respectively. S.G. performed the x-ray spectral analyses. S.K. led the theoretical discussion. P.S.R., T.O., Z.A., K.C.G., C.B.M., Y.S., S.K., S.B., and R.F. were responsible for NICER detector development, timing calibration, and observation planning. C.M., W.C.G.H., A.K.H., Z.W., W.A.M., T.G., G.K.J., K.A., S.S., N.L., and S.J.T. contributed to the theoretical interpretation. Y.M., H.T., K.T., M.S., Y.Y., H.M., F.T., T.A., M.T., M.H., O.K., and T.O. were responsible for the radio observations and associated data analyses. N.L. contributed the summary of previous studies. The authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: The NICER x-ray data are available from the NASA HEASARC archive https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ under the observation IDs listed in table S6. The HEASOFT x-ray analysis software is available from https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/heasoft/. The GRP event lists and our analysis source codes are available on Zenodo (32).

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Supplemental Material - abd4659-Enoto-SM-Movie-S1.mp4

Supplemental Material - abd4659-Enoto-SM.pdf

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