Hear pulsars

Pulsars have characteristic integrated pulse profile which you’d get after folding many pulses.

I got inspired by this tweet and thought “hey, can we hear integrated pulse profiles?”

Hear them there

J1713+0747

This is like shot noise. J1713+0747 pulse profile is like that of a delta function. So, shot noise makes sense. J1713+0747 pulsar profile

J2145-0750

It sounds like a two stroke engine. There are auto rickshaws in India (that’s where I am from) and this sound resembles that. Well, in all fairness, J2145-0750 has two peaks, so I am not suprised that it sounds like 2T engine. J2145-0750 pulsar profile

J1939+2134

This legit sounds like my trimmer. I am not kidding. J1939+2134 pulsar profile

How did I do that?

I took data from the CSIRO Data portal which hosts millions of Pulsar observations. I took Frequency, Time crunched profiles of three pulsars:

  • J1713+0747
  • J2145-0750
  • J1939+2134

An integrated pulse profile which is usually shown on a \([0,2\pi]\) axis and which can be linearly mapped to \([0, P]\) where \(P\) is period of the pulsar.

Human ear can hear sounds with frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. So, I map \([0,Nbin]\) to \([20, 20000]\) linearly.

In other words, I map ever every bin to a frequency and use the intensity value at that frequency as weight.

Mathematically,

\[p(t) = \sum_{i=0}^{N_{bin} P[i] * cos(2\pi t freq[i])\]

caveats

  • I use cosine which makes this kind of like Discrete Cosine Transform. My reasoning is that since integrated pulse profile is purely real. Sine terms don’t come in.

  • I initially thought of using Fourier Transform and the property of Inverse Fourier Transform of real signal (in frequency domain) is real and even. But, then I would have to take care of the appropriate frequency scaling and do many many manipulations since integrated profile isn’t actually frequency domain stuff anyway. So, I did something which is called _Extended Fourier Transform__ and manually did the transform.

  • To define a fudicial point in the integrated pulse profile, and to make the result same across all the pulsars. I rotate the profile so that maximum intensity exactly lies in the middle of the pulsar.

  • To also standardize, I hardcoded the length of the sound from pulsar to be 2 seconds. I couldn’t think of any other method to make the length sensible and charactistic to each pulsar.

Crux of code

# ip is integrated profile
rip = np.roll(ip, ip.size//2 - ip.argmax())
freq = np.linspace(20, 20e3, rip.size)
for i, f in enumerate(freq):
    ret = ret + rip[i] * np.cos(2*np.pi*f*t)

twas fun