Empirical Mantissa Distributions of Pulsars

Abstract

The occurrence of digits one through nine as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real world sources is often not uniformly distributed, but instead, is distributed according to a logarithmic law, known as Benford's law. Here, we investigate systematically the mantissa distributions of some pulsar quantities, and find that for most quantities their first digits conform to this law. However, the barycentric period shows significant deviation from the usual distribution, but satisfies a generalized Benford's law roughly. Therefore pulsars can serve as an ideal assemblage to study the first digit distributions of real world data, and the observations can be used to constrain theoretical models of pulsar behavior.