Refractive scintillation in the interstellar medium

The slow variation in the apparent intensity of pulsars on time scales of days to months was recently shown to be due to a large-scale component of interstellar scintillation (Rickett, Coles, and Bourgois). These variations are greater than one would expect if the turbulence spectrum were a simple Kolmogorov power law. It is shown that this large-scale component can be greatly enhanced when the turbulence spectrum has a limiting "inner scale" of the order of 10⁹m. The authors present a solution for the covariance of refractive scintillation of an extended source in an extended medium. The results show that refractive scintillations are also responsible for slow variations in "low-frequency variables".