Pulsar Science with the SKAO
Abstract
The large instantaneous sensitivity, wide frequency coverage and flexible observation modes, with large number of beams in the sky, are the main features of the SKA observatory's two telescopes, the SKA-Low and the SKA-Mid. Owing to these capabilities, the SKAO telescopes are going to be a game-changer for radio astronomy in general and pulsar astronomy in particular. Eleven chapters in this book describe their impact on different areas of pulsar science. In this overview article each chapter is briefly summarised and the inter-relationship between different pulsar science use cases are explored: new deep surveys, covering the Galactic field, globular clusters and the Galactic centre, will discover thousands of new pulsars; these will form the backbone for studies of neutron star physics and of their environments. The enhanced understanding provided by these studies will feed into the main contributions to fundamental physics from pulsar astronomy: testing relativistic gravity, studying gravitational waves in the nano-Hz regime and studying the equation of state of nuclear matter. Synergies with other science cases are also highlighted throughout this overview.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.01288,
title = {Pulsar Science with the SKAO},
author = {Bhal Chandra Joshi and Aris Karastergiou and Marta Burgay},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.01288},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
13 pages, 2 figures, Published in Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II (AASKAII), 2026 (arXiv:2606.20366). Report number AASKAII/Joshi01. Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II (AASKA II) outlines the transformative scientific advances that will be enabled by the SKA telescopes. An earlier version of this chapter was published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics with arXiv ID: arXiv:2512.16152