A study of 315 glitches in the rotation of 102 pulsars

Understand

The rotation of more than 700 pulsars has been monitored using the 76-m Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank.

• Here we report on a new search for glitches in the observations, revealing 128 new glitches in the rotation of 63 pulsars.
• Combining these new data with those already published we present a database containing 315 glitches in 102 pulsars.
• The database was used to study the glitch activity among the pulsar population, finding that it peaks for pulsars with a characteristic age tau_c ~ 10kyr and decreases for longer values of tau_c, disappearing for objects with tau_c > 20Myr.