Related papers: Radio pulsars: already fifty years!

Almost 50 years after radio pulsars were discovered in 1967, our understanding of these objects remains incomplete. On the one hand, within a few years it became clear that neutron star rotation gives rise to the extremely stable sequence…

Neutron stars are fascinating astrophysical objects immersed in strong gravitational and electromagnetic fields, at the edge of our current theories. These stars manifest themselves mostly as pulsars, emitting a timely very stable and…

It was as early as the 1980s that A V Gurevich and his group proposed a theory to explain the magnetosphere of radio pulsars and the mechanism by which they produce coherent radio emission. The theory has been sharply criticized and is…

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…

The sheer number of new gamma-ray pulsar discoveries by the Fermi Large Area Telescope since 2008, combined with the quality of new multi-frequency data, has caused a revolution in the field of high-energy rotation-powered pulsars. These…

Problems solved? Pulsar research must be considered - 35 years after the detection of pulsars - a mature science, where the basic questions have been raised and discussed. One would hope that many if not all generic and important problems…

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…

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…

The radiative mechanism of coherent radio emission has remained an enigma since the discovery of pulsars, even the emergence of fast radio bursts (FRBs), which exhibit similarities to the single-pulse behavior of pulsars and have opened a…

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…

Since pulsars were discovered as emitters of bright coherent radio emission more than half a century ago, the cause of the emission has remained a mystery. In this Letter we demonstrate that coherent radiation can be directly generated in…

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…

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…

Pulsars provide a wealth of information about General Relativity, the equation of state of superdense matter, relativistic particle acceleration in high magnetic fields, the Galaxy's interstellar medium and magnetic field, stellar and…

In their catalogue of pulsars' radio spectra, Swainston et al. (2022, PASA, 39, e056) distinguish between five different forms of these spectra: those that can be fitted with (i) a simple power law, (ii) a broken power law, (iii) a…

Almost 40 years after the discovery of pulsars -- and despite a plethora of secured data on them -- pulsar theory is still beset by a number of fundamental inconsistencies. In this short contribution, I will argue that (i) magnetars do not…

Surprisingly, the chronology of nearly 50 years of the pulsar magnetosphere and pulsar wind research is quite similar to the history of our civilization. Using this analogy, I have tried to outline the main results obtained in this field.…

Our initial impressions of astronomical objects was that they are inherently "static" over the course of any reasonably long observation. However, with the discovery of quasars and their scintillation in 1963-64, we learnt that there are…

Forty years have passed since the discovery of pulsars, yet the physical mechanism of their coherent radio emission is a mystery. Recent observational and theoretical studies strongly suggest that the radiation outcoming from the pulsar…

Searching for the physical mechanism that can excite the coherent radio emission in pulsars is still an enigmatic problem. A wealth of high quality observations exist, which over the years have been instrumental in putting stringent…