2004/03/08 by S. Paltani · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Classification of discontinuities #Detector #Galaxy #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Optics #Physics #Proportional counter #Pulsar #ROSAT #Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies #Range (aeronautics) #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20034220
published as Astron.Astrophys. 420 (2004) 789-797 · 10 pages. Accepted for publication in A&A
arxiv created 2004/03/08 · openalex publication_date 2004/05/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2022/10/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
We use Kuiper's test to detect periodicities in X-ray and gamma-ray observations. Like Rayleigh's test, it uses the individual photon arrival times, and is therefore well suited to the analysis of faint sources. Our method makes it possible to take into account the discontinuities in the observation, and to completely get rid of the contamination that results from them. This makes it particularly adapted to the search of periods long compared to the total observation duration. We propose a semi-analytical approach to determine the effective number of trial frequencies when searching for unknown periods over a frequency range. This approach can be easily adapted to other tests. We show that, using Kuiper's test, we can recover periods in frequency domains where other tests are completely confused by contamination. We finally search the entire ROSAT Position-Sensitive Proportional Counter (PSPC) archive for long periods, and find 28 new periodic-source candidates.