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  1. ABSTRACT

    We report here on the first results of a systematic monitoring of southern glitching pulsars at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy that started in the year 2019. We detected a major glitch in the Vela pulsar (PSR J0835 − 4510) and two small glitches in PSR J1048 − 5832. For each glitch, we present the measurement of glitch parameters by fitting timing residuals. We then make an individual pulse study of Vela in observations before and after the glitch. We selected 6 days of observations around the major glitch on 2021 July 22 and study their statistical properties with machine learning techniques. We use variational autoencoder (VAE) reconstruction of the pulses to separate them clearly from the noise. We perform a study with self-organizing map (SOM) clustering techniques to search for unusual behaviour of the clusters during the days around the glitch not finding notable qualitative changes. We have also detected and confirmed recent glitches in PSR J0742 − 2822 and PSR J1740 − 3015.

     
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  2. Abstract

    We perform a full 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamical (GRMHD) simulation of an equal-mass, spinning, binary black hole approaching merger, surrounded by a circumbinary disk and with a minidisk around each black hole. For this purpose, we evolve the ideal GRMHD equations on top of an approximated spacetime for the binary that is valid in every position of space, including the black hole horizons, during the inspiral regime. We use relaxed initial data for the circumbinary disk from a previous long-term simulation, where the accretion is dominated by am= 1 overdensity called the lump. We compare our new spinning simulation with a previous non-spinning run, studying how spin influences the minidisk properties. We analyze the accretion from the inner edge of the lump to the black hole, focusing on the angular momentum budget of the fluid around the minidisks. We find that minidisks in the spinning case have more mass over a cycle than the non-spinning case. However, in both cases we find that most of the mass received by the black holes is delivered by the direct plunging of material from the lump. We also analyze the morphology and variability of the electromagnetic fluxes, and we find they share the same periodicities of the accretion rate. In the spinning case, we find that the outflows are stronger than the non-spinning case. Our results will be useful to understand and produce realistic synthetic light curves and spectra, which can be used in future observations.

     
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  3. Abstract

    We present fully relativistic predictions for the electromagnetic emission produced by accretion disks surrounding spinning and nonspinning supermassive binary black holes on the verge of merging. We use the codeBothrosto post-process data from 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations via ray-tracing calculations. These simulations model the dynamics of a circumbinary disk and the mini-disks that form around two equal-mass black holes orbiting each other at an initial separation of 20 gravitational radii, and evolve the system for more than 10 orbits in the inspiral regime. We model the emission as the sum of thermal blackbody radiation emitted by an optically thick accretion disk and a power-law spectrum extending to hard X-rays emitted by a hot optically thin corona. We generate time-dependent spectra, images, and light curves at various frequencies to investigate intrinsic periodic signals in the emission, as well as the effects of the black hole spin. We find that prograde black hole spin makes mini-disks brighter since the smaller innermost stable circular orbit angular momentum demands more dissipation before matter plunges to the horizon. However, compared to mini-disks in larger separation binaries with spinning black holes, our mini-disks are less luminous: unlike those systems, their mass accretion rate is lower than in the circumbinary disk, and they radiate with lower efficiency because their inflow times are shorter. Compared to a single black hole system matched in mass and accretion rate, these binaries have spectra noticeably weaker and softer in the UV. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the potential observability of these systems.

     
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  4. null (Ed.)
  5. ABSTRACT

    We study individual pulses of Vela (PSR B0833−45/J0835−4510) from daily observations of over 3 h (around 120 000 pulses per observation), performed simultaneously with the two radio telescopes at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy. We select four days of observations in 2021 January to March and study their statistical properties with machine learning techniques. We first use Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise clustering techniques, associating pulses mainly by amplitudes, and find a correlation between higher amplitudes and earlier arrival times. We also find a weaker (polarization dependent) correlation with the mean width of the pulses. We identify clusters of the so-called mini-giant pulses, with ∼10 times the average pulse amplitude. We then perform an independent study, with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) clustering techniques. We use Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) reconstruction of the pulses to separate them clearly from the noise and select one of the days of observation to train VAE and apply it to the rest of the observations. We use SOM to determine four clusters of pulses per day per radio telescope and conclude that our main results are robust and self-consistent. These results support models for emitting regions at different heights (separated each by roughly a hundred km) in the pulsar magnetosphere. We also model the pulses amplitude distribution with interstellar scintillation patterns at the inter-pulses time-scale finding a characterizing exponent nISS ∼ 7–10. In the appendices, we discuss independent checks of hardware systematics with the simultaneous use of the two radio telescopes in different one-polarization/two-polarizations configurations. We also provide a detailed analysis of the processes of radio-interferences cleaning and individual pulse folding.

     
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