Related papers: Pulsar Dreams
Pulsars are remarkably precise "celestial clocks" that can be used to explore many different aspects of physics and astrophysics. In this article I give a brief summary of pulsar properties and describe some of the applications of pulsar…
The PULSE@Parkes project has been designed to monitor the rotation of radio pulsars over time spans of days to years. The observations are obtained using the Parkes 64-m and 12-m radio telescopes by Australian and international high school…
The motivation for radio pulsar timing and its basic principles are reviewed. Present and future radio timing techniques and hardware are summarised and compared. The array of present timing programmes and their scientific goals are…
We investigate the birth and evolution of isolated radio pulsars using a population synthesis method, modeling the birth properties of the pulsars, their time evolution, and their detection in the Parkes and Swinburne Multibeam (MB)…
The phenomenal rotational stability of millisecond pulsars allows them to be used as precise celestial clocks. An array of these pulsars can be exploited to search for correlated perturbations in their pulse times of arrival due to…
For fifty years astronomers have been searching for pulsar signals in observational data. Throughout this time the process of choosing detections worthy of investigation, so called candidate selection, has been effective, yielding thousands…
I partially review our current knowledge on microquasars, making special emphasis on radio interferometric observations, and I comment on emerging trends in this field of astrophysics.
Over the last fifty years since the discovery of pulsars, our understanding of where and how pulsars emit the radiation we observe has undergone significant revision. The location and mechanisms of high-energy radiation are intimately tied…
Pulsar timing array projects are carrying out high precision observations of millisecond pulsars with the aim of detecting ultra-low frequency (~ 10^{-9} to 10^{-8} Hz) gravitational waves. We show how unambiguous detections of such waves…
A search for pulse signals was carried out in a new sky area included in the monitoring program for the search for pulsars and transients. Processing of several months data recorded in six frequency channels with a total bandwidth of 2.5…
I recall how the discovery of quasars occurred more than forty years ago, and the strong debates marking out their story. It led to the discovery of Massive Black Holes, which are now known to be present in almost all galaxies, and it…
The fortieth anniversary of the original construction of Supergravity provides an opportunity to combine some reminiscences of its early days with an assessment of its impact on the quest for a quantum theory of gravity.
I review the results of radio and X-ray searches for pulsations from young neutron stars, emphasizing work accomplished in the last five years. I cover undirected searches, as well as directed searches of pulsar wind nebulae, EGRET…
This article gives a sketch of teachers and colleagues who have had strong influence on my becoming a particle physicist.
We review the properties and applications of binary and millisecond pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years, mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the known pulsar population to…
I feel that I have been very lucky since I have experienced the most dynamic 30 years on electronics in the past. I think that the most visible change in our daily life over the past 30 years is communications. From computer modems, to…
The study of pulsars has come a long way since their accidental discovery as ``scruff'' on pen chart recordings of the radio sky at 81 MHz by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish at Cambridge some thirty years ago. The present sample of almost…
Although fifty years have passed since the discovery of radio pulsars, there is still no satisfactory understanding of how these amazing objects operate. While there has been significant progress in understanding the basic properties of…
Pulsars are potentially the most remarkable physical laboratories we will ever use. Although in many senses they are extremely clean systems there are a large number of instabilities and variabilities seen in the emission and rotation of…
This article is not a proof of the Poincar\'{e} conjecture but a discussion of the proof, its context, and some of the people who played a prominent role. It is a personal, anecdotal account. There may be omission or transpositions as these…