Discovery of Three Glitches in the previously quiet pulsar PSR J1637$-$4642

Abstract

We present the discovery and analysis of three rotational glitches in the young pulsar PSR J1637$-$4642. The timing observations span from 19 February 2009 to 6 October 2024 (MJD 54881$-$60589) from the Murriyang radio telescope of the Parkes Observatory. The first and strongest glitch occurred around MJD 58352 with a fractional frequency change of $\Delta \nu /\nu \sim 2.7\times 10^{-6}$, while two additional smaller glitches were detected at MJD 59443 and MJD 60445 with fractional changes of $2.2\times 10^{-9}$ and $2.8\times 10^{-8}$, respectively. Prior to this, the pulsar had shown no glitch activity since its discovery in the Parkes Multibeam survey. Only the first glitch exhibits detectable exponential recovery, with a decay timescale of $\sim$100 days and a small recovery fraction $\approx 0.015$, accompanied by a permanent increase in the magnitude of the spin-down rate. Modeling the post-glitch evolution of $\dot{\nu }$ within the vortex-creep framework using Bayesian inference gives a superfluid moment-of-inertia fraction $\approx 0.0187$, consistent with the inner-crust superfluid. These results reinforce the standard superfluid glitch paradigm and demonstrate that even ``quiet'' pulsars can still host substantial glitch activity.

Comments: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ (2026)