National conference on REcent Trends in the study of Compact Objects (RETCO-V): Theory and Observation

Do pulsar and Fast Radio Burst dispersion measures obey Benford’s law?

Not scheduled

1m

Posters Posters

Speaker

Dr Shantanu Desai (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad)

Description

We check if the first significant digit of the dispersion measure of pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (using the CHIME catalog) is consistent with the Benford distribution. We find a large disagreement with Benford’s law with ${\chi }^2$ close to $80$ for $8$ degrees of freedom for both these aforementioned datasets. This corresponds to a discrepancy of about $7𝜎$. Therefore, we conclude that the dispersion measures of pulsars and FRBs do not obey Benford’s law.