Related papers: Pulsars as Standard Candles
Gravitational wave sources are a promising cosmological standard candle because their intrinsic luminosities are determined by fundamental physics (and are insensitive to dust extinction). They are, however, affected by weak lensing…
Gamma-rays from pulsars can be efficiently attenuated in their magnetospheres via the mechanism of single-photon pair production and also the exotic QED process of photon splitting, which become prolific in fields approaching the quantum…
Weak Equivalent Principle (WEP) can be tested through the parameterized post-Newtonian parameter $\gamma$, representing the space curvature produced by unit rest mass. The parameter $\gamma$ in turn has been constrained by comparing the…
We report results on the timing and spectral analysis of observations of the millisecond pulsar PSR B1821-24 with RXTE, BeppoSAX and Chandra. The X-ray light curve is characterized by two narrow peaks at a phase distance of 0.452+/-0.002.…
We present spectra of pulsed gamma-ray emission expected from millisecond pulsars within the framework of polar-cap models. The spectra are a superposition of three components due to curvature (CR), synchrotron (SR), and Compton…
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are short and intense pulses of $\gamma$-rays arriving from random directions in the sky. Several years ago Amelino-Camelia et al. pointed out that a comparison of time of arrival of photons at different energies…
We present the model for determination of pulsar distances or average electron distribution using a method similar to the widely used dependence of A$_V$ on distances in different directions. To have reliable pulsar distances, we have used…
We systematically study pulsar light curves, taking into account the special relativistic effect, i.e., the Doppler factor due to the fast spin of the neutron stars, together with the time delay, which comes from the difference of the…
Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are among the most powerful sources in the Universe: they emit up to 10^54 erg in the hard X-ray band in few tens of seconds. The cosmological origin of GRBs has been confirmed by several spectroscopic measurements…
(Abridged) Gamma-ray emission from pulsars has long been modeled using a vacuum dipole field. This approximation ignores changes in the field structure caused by the magnetospheric plasma and strong plasma currents. We present the first…
Three pulsar timing arrays are now producing high quality data sets. As reviewed in this paper, these data sets are been processed to 1) develop a pulsar-based time standard, 2) search for errors in the solar system planetary ephemeris and…
Dirac, in 1937 proposed the variation of coupling constants derived from his large number hypothesis. Efforts have continued since then to constrain their variation by various methods. We briefly discuss several methods used for the purpose…
Observing simultaneously pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission from these stars helps to constrain the geometry and radiation mechanisms within their magnetosphere and to localize the multiple photon production sites. In this paper, we fit…
The Lense-Thirring effect from spinning neutron stars in double neutron star binaries contribute to the periastron advance of the orbit. This extra term involves the moment of inertia of the neutron stars. Moment of inertia, on the other…
We examine a method to detect the light speed variation from gamma ray burst data observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST). We suggest new criteria to determine the characteristic time for low energy photons by the energy…
We have monitored a large sample of millisecond pulsars using the 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope in order to compare their radio emission properties to the slowly rotating population. With some notable exceptions, our findings suggest…
A number of rotation-powered millisecond pulsars are powerful sources of X-ray emission. We present predictions for the spectral characteristics of these sources at gamma-ray energies, using a model for acceleration and pair cascades on…
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…
We present preliminary results from a systematic spectral study of pulsars and their wind nebulae using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The superb spatial resolution of Chandra allows us to differentiate the compact object's spectrum from…
Detailed modeling of the millisecond brightness oscillations during thermonuclear bursts from low mass X-ray binaries can provide important information about neutron star structure. Until now the implementation of this idea has not been…