Determine whether slow pulsars with massive companions are over-abundant in Glimpse-C01

Determine whether slow pulsars with massive companions are over-abundant in the globular cluster Glimpse-C01, and thereby assess whether the cluster has an unusual evolutionary history or whether faster-spinning pulsars remain undiscovered because of dispersive smearing and multipath scattering.

Background

J1848−0129D is a relatively slowly spinning pulsar with a massive white-dwarf companion, and several of the pulsars discovered in Glimpse-C01 have spin periods between 10 and 20 ms. The authors note that this may indicate an over-abundance of mildly recycled pulsars with massive companions in the cluster, although propagation effects could instead be obscuring a larger population of faster-spinning systems.

Resolving this question requires distinguishing an intrinsic peculiarity of the Glimpse-C01 pulsar population from a frequency-dependent selection effect caused by the cluster’s high dispersion measure and strong multipath scattering.

References

This raises the question of whether slow pulsars with massive companions are over-abundant in this GC.

— The first MeerKAT S-band globular cluster pulsar survey  (2609.10184 - Nag et al., 9 Sep 2026) in Section 6.2, “The newly discovered Glimpse-C01 pulsars”