Related papers: Pulsar scintillation patterns and strangelets
Quasars shine brightly due to the liberation of gravitational energy as matter falls onto a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy. Variations in the radiation received from active galactic nuclei (AGN) are studied at all…
In extreme scattering events, the brightness of a compact radio source drops significantly, as light is refracted out of the line of sight by foreground plasma lenses. Despite recent efforts, the nature of these lenses has remained a…
Stars twinkle because their light propagates through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected on a longer time scale when the light of remote stars crosses an interstellar turbulent molecular cloud, but it has never been observed at…
Interstellar scintillation (ISS) has been established as the cause of the random variations seen at centimetre wavelengths in many compact radio sources on timescales of a day or less. Observations of ISS can be used to probe structure both…
Extreme Scattering Events and pulsar secondary spectra have highlighted fundamental problems in our understanding of the dynamics of interstellar turbulence. We describe some of these problems in detail and present the theory behind the…
Interstellar turbulence has implications for the dispersal and mixing of the elements, cloud chemistry, cosmic ray scattering, and radio wave propagation through the ionized medium. This review discusses the observations and theory of these…
PKS 1257-326 is a quasar showing extremely unusual, rapid interstellar scintillation (ISS), which has persisted for at least a decade. Simultaneous observations with the VLA and ATCA, combined with ATCA monitoring over several years, have…
The dynamic and secondary spectra of many pulsars show evidence for long-lived, aligned images of the pulsar that are stationary on a thin scattering sheet. One explanation for this phenomenon considers the effects of wave crests along…
Gravitation could modulate the interstellar scintillation of pulsars in a way that is analogous to refractive interstellar scintillation (RISS). While RISS occurs when a large ionized cloud crosses the pulsar line-of-sight, gravitational…
Observations of pulsar scintillation are among the few astrophysical probes of very small-scale ($\lesssim$ au) phenomena in the interstellar medium (ISM). In particular, characterization of scintillation arcs, including their curvature and…
Strange Nuggets are believed to be among the relics of the early universe. They appear as dark matter due to their low charge-to-mass ratio. Their distribution is believed to be the same as that of dark matter. As such, they could be…
We introduce a novel analysis technique for pulsar secondary spectra. The power spectrum of pulsar scintillation (referred to as the "secondary spectrum") shows differential delays and Doppler shifts due to interference from multi-path…
Several experiments (e.g., Milagro and IceCube) have reported the presence in the sky of regions with significant excess in the arrival direction distributions of Galactic cosmic rays in the TeV to PeV energy range. Here we study the…
Extrasolar planets appear in a chemical diversity unseen in our own solar system. Despite their atmospheres being cold, continuous and transient plasma processes do affect these atmosphere where clouds form with great efficiency. Clouds can…
Aims: Stars twinkle because their light propagates through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected at a longer time scale when the light of remote stars crosses an interstellar molecular cloud, but it has never been observed at…
We discuss optimal detection of fast radio transients from astrophysical objects while taking into account the effects of propagation through intervening ionized media, including dispersion, scattering and scintillation.Our analysis applies…
The interstellar scintillation observed in radio pulsars arises from interference between electromagnetic waves scattered by electron density fluctuations in the turbulent interstellar plasma, providing a critical tool for probing the…
We observed the scintillation pattern of nine bright pulsars at 324 MHz and three at 1.68 GHz and analyzed the wavenumber spectrum which is related to electron density variations of the plasma turbulence of the interstellar medium. For all…
A subset of magnetic stars exhibit periodic radio pulses produced by the coherent electron cyclotron maser mechanism. These pulses are known to exhibit both temporal and spectral variations, which have been attributed to phenomena intrinsic…
Radio variability in quasars has been seen on timescales ranging from days to years due to both intrinsic and propagation induced effects. Although separating the two is not always straight-forward, observations of singular `events' in…