Spectral and timing properties of the X-ray emission from the millisecond pulsar PSR B1821-24

Abstract

We report results on the timing and spectral analysis of observations of the millisecond pulsar PSR B1821-24 with RXTE, BeppoSAX and Chandra. The X-ray light curve is characterized by two narrow peaks at a phase distance of 0.452 ±0.002. The average pulsed emission, over the range 1.6-20 keV, is well represented by a single power law with a photon index α = 1.30 +0.05-0.02 and unabsorbed (2-10 keV) pulsed X-ray flux of 3.9 × 10-13 erg cm-2 s-1. We searched for a possible bunching of X-ray photons to verify if the X ray emission has a time structure similar to that of giant pulses and found a negative result.