Classification of pulsars with Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (1904.04204v2)

Abstract: Young isolated neutron stars (INS) most commonly manifest themselves as rotationally powered pulsars (RPPs) which involve conventional radio pulsars as well as gamma-ray pulsars (GRPs) and rotating radio transients (RRATs). Some other young INS families manifest themselves as anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) which are commonly accepted as magnetars, i.e. magnetically powered neutron stars with decaying superstrong fields. Yet some other young INS are identified as central compact objects (CCOs) and X-ray dim isolated neutron stars (XDINSs) which are cooling objects powered by their thermal energy. Older pulsars, as a result of a previous long episode of accretion from a companion, manifest themselves as millisecond pulsars and more commonly appear in binary systems. We use Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (DPGMM), an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, for analyzing the distribution of these pulsar families in the parameter space of period and period derivative. We compare the average values of the characteristic age, magnetic dipole field strength, surface temperature and transverse velocity of all discovered clusters. We verify that DPGMM is robust and provides hints for inferring relations between different classes of pulsars. We discuss the implications of our findings for the magneto-thermal spin evolution models and fallback discs.