Interstellar scintillation of PSR J0437–4715 on two scales

¹ Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA e-mail: [cgwinn;hirano]@physics.ucsb.edu
² Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA e-mail: boldyrev@flash.uchicago.edu

Received: 30 September 2005
Accepted: 13 March 2006

Abstract

Aims.We sought to determine the scale of scintillation in the interstellar plasma of PSR J0437-4715.

Methods.We used the Very Long Baseline Array to obtain scintillation amplitude and phase data, from dynamic spectra at 327 MHz.

Results.We observe two scales of scintillation of pulsar PSR J0437-4715, differing by more than an order of magnitude in scintillation bandwidth. The wider-bandwidth scale of scintillation that we observe indicates less scattering for this pulsar than for other nearby pulsars, other than PSR B0950+08.