Revisiting Pulsar Velocities Using Gaia Data Release 2

Understand

Precise measurements of neutron star (NS) velocities provide critical clues to the supernova physics and evolution of binary systems.

• Based on Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2), we selected a sample of 24 young (<3 Myr) pulsars with precise parallax measurements and measured the velocity of their local standard of rest (LSR) and the velocity dispersion among their respective local stellar groups.
• The median velocity difference between thus calculated LSRs and the Galactic rotation model is ~7.6km/s, small compared to the typical velocity dispersion of ~27.5km/s.
• For pulsars off the Galactic plane, such differences grow significantly to as large as ~40 km/s.