Related papers: Pulsars are cool. Seriously
A new era in fundamental physics began when pulsars were discovered in 1967. Soon it became clear that pulsars were useful tools for a wide variety of physical and astrophysical problems. Further applications became possible with the…
The 1974 discovery, by Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, of the first binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, opened up new possibilities for the study of relativistic gravity. PSR B1913+16, as well as several other binary pulsars, provided {\it…
The discovery of the first pulsar in a binary star system, the Hulse--Taylor pulsar, 50 years ago opened up an entirely new field of experimental gravity. For the first time it was possible to investigate strong-field and radiative aspects…
Binary radio pulsars, first discovered by Hulse and Taylor in 1974 [1], are a unique tool for experimentally testing general relativity (GR), whose validity has been confirmed with a precision unavailable in laboratory experiments. In…
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…
We review the main properties, demographics and applications of binary and millisecond radio pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years, mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the…
Pulsars, the cosmic lighthouses, are strongly self-gravitating objects with core densities significantly exceeding nuclear density. Since the discovery of the Hulse--Taylor pulsar 50 years ago, binary pulsar studies have delivered numerous…
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…
We review the main properties, demographics and applications of binary and millisecond radio pulsars. Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years, mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the…
Pulsars are fantastic objects, which show the extreme states of matters and plasma physics not understood yet. Pulsars can be used as probes for the detection of interstellar medium and even the gravitational waves. Here I review the basic…
Radio pulsars have been responsible for many astonishing astrophysical and fundamental physics breakthroughs since their discovery 50 years ago. In this review I will discuss many of the highlights, most of which were only possible because…
Globular clusters produce orders of magnitude more millisecond pulsars per unit mass than the Galactic disk. Since the first cluster pulsar was uncovered twenty years ago, at least 138 have been identified - most of which are binary…
Searches for millisecond pulsars (which we here loosely define as those with periods $<$ 20 ms) in the Galactic field have undergone a renaissance in the past five years. New or recently refurbished radio telescopes utilizing cooled…
Radio pulsars are unique laboratories for a wide range of physics and astrophysics. Understanding how they are created, how they evolve and where we find them in the Galaxy, with or without binary companions, is highly constraining of…
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…
Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…
Pulsars are wonderful gravitational probes. Their tiny size and stellar mass give their rotation periods a stablility comparable to that of atomic frequency standards. This is especially true of the rapidly rotating "millisecond pulsars"…
Pulsars are the most stable macroscopic clocks found in nature. Spinning with periods as short as a few milliseconds, their stability can supersede that of the best atomic clocks on Earth over timescales of a few years. Stable clocks are…
It has now been just over four decades since the first discovery of a millisecond spin period pulsar (MSP), B1937+21, by Don Backer and collaborators in late 1982. This finding of an entirely new class of astronomical object revolutionized…
The first pulsar observations were made at Parkes on March 8, 1968, just 13 days after the publication of the discovery paper by Hewish and Bell. Since then, Parkes has become the world's most successful pulsar search machine, discovering…