Red Noise in Anomalous X-ray Pulsar Timing Residuals

Understand

Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs), thought to be magnetars, exhibit poorly understood deviations from a simple spin-down called "timing noise".

• AXP timing noise has strong low-frequency components which pose significant challenges for quantification.
• We describe a procedure for extracting two quantities of interest, the intensity and power spectral index of timing noise.
• We apply this procedure to timing data from three sources: a monitoring campaign of five AXPs, observations of five young pulsars, and the stable rotator PSR B1937+21.