Catalogue

The catalogue comprises YAML files containing pulsar flux density measurements for each paper the repository has included. You should not assume that this repository has all flux density measurements for a pulsar you are interested in. Instead, you should search through the literature to find all papers that contain flux density measurements of the pulsar and confirm all of those papers are in the catalogue. If you would like to add a new paper to the catalogue see the Adding to the catalogue section.

Using the catalogue

This section will explain how to use the catalogue. If you would like more information, you can see the module documentation in the catalogue module description.

You can use the following command to get all fluxes from the catalogue.

from pulsar_spectra.catalogues import collect_catalogue_fluxes
cat_dict = collect_catalogue_fluxes()

cat_dict will have the format

cat_dict = {"Pulsar Jname":[["List of frequencies in MHz"],
                            ["List of flux densities in mJy"],
                            ["List of flux density uncertainties in mJy"],
                            ["The reference label (in the format 'Author_year')"]],
            "Other pulsar":[["List of frequencies in MHz"],
                            ["List of flux densities in mJy"],
                            ["List of flux density uncertainties in mJy"],
                            ["The reference label (in the format 'Author_year')"]],
           }

For example, this is the data for PSR J1453-6413.

print(cat_dict['J1453-6413'])
[[950.0, 800.0, 1400, 8400, 728, 1382, 3100, 185.0, 200.0, 154.0, 200, 400, 150, 800],
 [42.0, 89.0, 14.0, 1.5, 80.0, 18.0, 2.4, 1244.0, 684.0, 630.0, 684.0, 230.0, 630.0, 53.0],
 [4.2, 26.7, 1.4, 0.75, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, 20.0, 23.0, 200.0, 23.0, 115.0, 20.0, 3.0],
 ['van_Ommen_1997', 'van_Ommen_1997', 'Hobbs_2004', 'Johnston_2006', 'Jankowski_2018', 'Jankowski_2018', 'Jankowski_2018', 'Xue_2017', 'Xue_2017', 'Bell_2016', 'Murphy_2017', 'Taylor_1993', 'Bell_2016', 'Jankowski_2019']]

You can add your data like so before fitting the spectra

freqs, fluxs, flux_errs, refs = cat_dict[pulsar]
freqs += [150.]
fluxs += [1000.]
flux_errs += [100.]
refs += ["Your Work"]

You can exclude papers that you don’t trust the results or if you think they’re negatively affecting your fit. For example, I can create a cat_dict without Sieber et al. 1973 like so

cat_dict = collect_catalogue_fluxes(exclude=["Sieber_1973"])

Inversely if you only what the flux density measurements from a few papers, you can use the include argument. For example, you can create a cat_dict that only includes data from Murphy et al. 2017 and Xue et al. 2017 like so

cat_dict = collect_catalogue_fluxes(include=["Murphy_2017", "Xue_2017"])

Papers included in our catalogue

Papers included in our catalogue
Paper	# Pulsars	Frequency range (MHz)	Link
ATNF pulsar catalogue	2827	40-150000	Catalogue website
Sieber (1973)	27	38-10690	ADS
Bartel et al. (1978)	18	14800-22700	ADS
Izvekova et al. (1981)	86	39-102	ADS
Johnston et al. (1993)	1	430-2360	ADS
Taylor et al. (1993)	639	400-1400	ADS
Lorimer et al. (1995)	280	408-1606	ADS
van Ommen et al. (1997)	82	800-960	ADS
Malofeev et al. (2000)	212	102-102	ADS
Hobbs et al. (2004)	275	400-1400	ADS
Karastergiou et al. (2005)	48	1400-3100	ADS
Johnston et al. (2006)	31	8400-8400	ADS
Kijak et al. (2007)	11	325-1060	ADS
Bates et al. (2011)	34	1400-6500	ADS
Keith et al. (2011)	9	17000-24000	ADS
Kijak et al. (2011)	15	610-4850	ADS
Zakharenko et al. (2013)	40	20-25	ADS
Dai et al. (2015)	24	730-3100	ADS
Stovall et al. (2015)	36	35-79	ADS
Basu et al. (2016)	1	325-1280	ADS
Bell et al. (2016)	17	154-154	ADS
Bilous et al. (2016)	158	149-149	ADS
Han et al. (2016)	204	1274-1466	ADS
Kijak et al. (2017)	12	325-610	ADS
Mignani et al. (2017)	1	97500-343500	ADS
Murphy et al. (2017)	60	76-227	ADS
Xue et al. (2017)	50	185-185	ADS
Jankowski et al. (2018)	441	728-3100	ADS
Johnston et al. (2018)	586	1400-1400	ADS
Jankowski et al. (2019)	205	843-843	ADS
Sanidas et al. (2019)	290	135-135	ADS
Zhao et al. (2019)	71	4820-5124	ADS
Bilous et al. (2020)	43	53-63	ADS
Bondonneau et al. (2020)	64	53-65	ADS
Johnston et al. (2021)	44	1400-1400	ADS

Adding to the catalogue

If you would like to add a new paper to the catalogue, you should first format the data into CSV with the following format:

Pulsar Jname,Frequency (MHz),Flux Density (mJy),Flux Density Uncertainty (mJy)
J0030+0451,150,37.6,4.4
J0030+0451,180,32.4,3.2
J0034-0534,150,202.8,7.9
J0034-0721,150,367.9,10.5

Then move to the scripts subdirectory of the repository and run the command:

python csv_to_yaml.py --csv your_paper.csv --ref author_year

This will put a YAML file of the paper in pulsar_spectra/catalogue_papers/. You should then reinstall the software (python setup.py install) then run a spectral fit to confirm it worked.

So others can use this paper’s data, you should

Make a fork of the pulsar_spectra repository
Clone your fork
Add the new paper YAML file and make a commit
Git push to your fork and then make a pull request on GitHub
Wait for your pull request to be approved and merged
Pat yourself on the back for contributing to open-source software!

Catalogue format

The catalogue is made up of YAML files of each paper. The format of the YAML files is:

{
    "Pulsar Jname": {
        "Frequency MHz":    ["List of frequencies in MHz"],
        "Flux Density mJy": ["List of flux densities in mJy"],
        "Flux Density error mJy": ["List of flux density uncertainties in mJy"]
    }
}

For example:

{
    "J0030+0451": {
        "Frequency MHz": [150.0, 180.0],
        "Flux Density mJy": [ 37.6, 32.4],
        "Flux Density error mJy": [ 4.4, 3.2]
    },
    "J0034-0534": {
        "Frequency MHz": [150.0],
        "Flux Density mJy": [202.8],
        "Flux Density error mJy": [7.9]
    },
}