juliensimon/pulsar-catalog
ATNF Pulsar Catalogue Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. Dataset description Complete catalog of known radio pulsars from the ATNF Pulsar Catalogue, including spin parameters, dispersion measures, flux densities, and derived quantities. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation. The ATNF Pulsar Catalogue (Manchester et al. 2005) is the definitive reference catalog… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/pulsar-catalog.
ATNF Pulsar Catalogue
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="Pulsar artist concept showing a rapidly spinning neutron star" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/astronomy-datasets-69c24caf2f17e36128946743) on Hugging Face.
Dataset description
Complete catalog of known radio pulsars from the ATNF Pulsar Catalogue, including spin parameters, dispersion measures, flux densities, and derived quantities.
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation. The ATNF Pulsar Catalogue (Manchester et al. 2005) is the definitive reference catalog, maintained by CSIRO. It includes spin period, period derivative, dispersion measure, flux density, distance estimates, and derived quantities such as characteristic age, surface magnetic field, and spin-down luminosity.
Millisecond pulsars (period < 30 ms) are ancient pulsars spun up by accretion from a companion star. They are among the most precise clocks in the universe and are used for pulsar timing arrays to detect gravitational waves.
The physics encoded in this catalog is remarkably rich. The spin period P and its time derivative P-dot together constrain the pulsar's magnetic field strength (B ~ 3.2e19 sqrt(P * P-dot) Gauss), characteristic age (tau ~ P / 2P-dot), and spin-down luminosity. Plotting P vs. P-dot produces the famous pulsar "island diagram," revealing distinct populations: normal pulsars clustered around P ~ 0.5 s with B ~ 10^12 G, millisecond pulsars in the lower-left corner with B ~ 10^8-9 G and ages exceeding the Hubble time, and magnetars in the upper-right with B > 10^14 G.
This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.
Schema
Quick stats
- 4,393 pulsars
- 817 millisecond pulsars (period < 30 ms)
- 499 binary pulsars
- Median period: 0.4901 s
- Median DM: 146.7 pc/cm^3
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/pulsar-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/pulsar-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
# Millisecond pulsars
msp = df[df["is_millisecond"] == True]
print(f"{len(msp):,} millisecond pulsars")
# Binary pulsars
binaries = df[df["is_binary"] == True]
print(f"{len(binaries):,} in binary systems")
# Period-period derivative diagram (P-Pdot)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
valid = df.dropna(subset=["period", "period_dot"])
valid = valid[valid["period_dot"] > 0]
plt.scatter(valid["period"], valid["period_dot"], s=1, alpha=0.5)
plt.xscale("log"); plt.yscale("log")
plt.xlabel("Period (s)")
plt.ylabel("Period derivative (s/s)")
plt.title("P-Pdot Diagram")
plt.show()Data source
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/atnfpulsar.html
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About the author
Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.
Citation
@dataset{pulsar_catalog,
title = {ATNF Pulsar Catalogue},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/pulsar-catalog},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
note = {Derived from NASA HEASARC (High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center), https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/atnfpulsar.html}
}