2025/11/30 by A., Sanjith, Desai, Shantanu
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.00784
We test whether the Efron-Petrosian (E-P) method can recover the inverse-square law dependence of the radio pulsar flux, using a synthetic catalog generated according to the specifications of the Parkes multi-beam survey using the \tt PsrPopPy software. We find that the E-P method cannot reproduce the inverse-square law, except over a narrow range of flux thresholds and even here we don't get pristine agreement. The main reason for the deviation is that the synthetic radio pulsar catalog is truncated based on a cut on the pulsar signal to noise ratio (SNR), which has a non-linear dependence on the flux along with plenty of scatter. We show that the disagreement is exacerbated as we raise the SNR threshold. We then demonstrate that if we create a synthetic catalog based on a flux cut (instead of an SNR-based threshold), we can recover the true distance exponent, with an accuracy ranging from pristine agreement to within ± 1 σ depending on the chosen flux threshold.