Related papers: Probing gravitation with pulsars
The discovery of a pulsar (PSR) in orbit around a black hole (BH) is expected to provide a superb new probe of relativistic gravity and BH properties. Apart from a precise mass measurement for the BH, one could expect a clean verification…
Arrays of precisely-timed millisecond pulsars are used to search for gravitational waves with periods of months to decades. Gravitational waves affect the path of radio pulses propagating from a pulsar to Earth, causing the arrival times of…
The SKA will discover tens of thousands of pulsars and provide unprecedented data quality on these, as well as the currently known population, due to its unrivalled sensitivity. Here, we outline the state of the art of our understanding of…
Millisecond pulsars are intrinsically very stable clocks and precise measurement of their observed pulse periods can be used to study a wide variety of astrophysical phenomena. In particular, observations of a large sample of millisecond…
The majority of fast millisecond pulsars are in binary systems, so that any periodic signal they emit is modulated by both Doppler and relativistic effects. Here we show how well-established binary models can be used to account for these…
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…
The first direct observation of gravitational waves' action upon matter has recently been reported by the BICEP2 experiment. Advanced ground-based gravitational-wave detectors are being installed. They will soon be commissioned, and then…
According to general relativity, clocks are the basic measuring devices needed to probe spacetime geometry. However, it is generally accepted that the mass of clocks capable of measuring small time intervals must be bounded from below. In…
A world-wide array of highly sensitive interferometers stands poised to usher in a new era in astronomy with the first direct detection of gravitational waves. The data from these instruments will provide a unique perspective on extreme…
Luminosity is an intrinsic property of radio pulsars related to the properties of the magnetospheric plasma and the beam geometry, and inversely proportional to the observing frequency. In traditional models, luminosity has been considered…
Pulsar timing offers an independent avenue to test general relativity and alternative gravity theories. This requires an understanding of how metric polarizations beyond the familiar transverse tensor ones imprint as a stochastic…
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…
An external reference system suitable for deep space navigation can be defined by fast spinning and strongly magnetized neutron stars, called pulsars. Their beamed periodic signals have timing stabilities comparable to atomic clocks and…
Precision pulsar timing at the level of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds allows detection of nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs) from supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) at the cores of merging galaxies and, potentially, from exotic…
Our understanding of the neutron star population is informed to a great degree by large-scale surveys that have been carried out by radio facilities during the past fifty years. We summarize some of the recent breakthroughs in our…
Pulsars have now been studied for 34 years. We know of the existence of some 1500 objects at radio frequencies. Many of the characteristics of pulsars such as pulsar period, period derivative, spectrum, polarization, etc., have been…
Millisecond and binary pulsars are the most stable astronomical standards of frequency. They can be applied to solving a number of problems in astronomy and time-keeping metrology including the search for a stochastic gravitational wave…
Thirty-five years after the discovery of rotation-powered pulsars, we still do not understand the fundamentals of their pulsed emission at any wavelength. Even detailed pulse profiles cannot identify the location of the emission in a…
Recent work has made it clear that the ``standard model'' of pulsar radio emission cannot be the full answer. Some fundamental assumptions about the magnetic field and plasma flow in the radio-loud region have been called into question by…
Some pulsars have their maximum observable energy output in the gamma-ray band, offering the possibility of using these high-energy photons as probes of the particle acceleration and interaction processes in pulsar magnetospheres. After an…