Radio pulsar populations

Understand

The goal of this article is to summarize the current state of play in the field of radio pulsar statistics.

• Simply put, from the observed sample of objects from a variety of surveys with different telescopes, we wish to infer the properties of the underlying sample and to connect these with other astrophysical populations (for example supernova remnants or X-ray binaries).
• The main problem we need to tackle is the fact that, like many areas of science, the observed populations are often heavily biased by a variety of selection effects.
• After a review of the main effects relevant to radio pulsars, I discuss techniques to correct for them and summarize some of the most recent results.