Glitch time series and size distributions in eight prolific pulsars

Understand

Glitches are rare spin-up events that punctuate the smooth slow-down of the rotation of pulsars.

• For the Vela pulsar and PSR J0537-6910, the glitch sizes and the times between consecutive events have clear preferred scales, contrary to the handful of other pulsars with enough glitches for such a study.
• Moreover, PSR J0537-6910 is the only pulsar showing a strong positive correlation between the size of each glitch and the waiting time until the following one.
• We attempt to understand this behavior through a detailed study of the distributions and correlations of glitch properties for the eight pulsars with at least ten detected glitches.