Princeton Pulsar Laboratory, including audio
UC Santa Cruz history of pulsars
European Pulsar Network, including zipped animations
Gravitational Waves On-Line
Pulsar Planets
gravitational radiation, general list
LIGO
VIRGO
LISA:
http://www.estec.esa.nl/spdwww/future/html/lisa.htm,
http://www.lisa.uni-hannover.de/
The latest about an ongoing survey at the Parkes radio telescope in
Australia that is discovering hundreds of pulsars:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/researchpulsar/psr/pmsurv/pmwww/
http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/pspm/arecibo/planets/planets.html
An international team of researchers using a giant radio telescope in Australia, equipped with a new "multibeam" receiver system, has just discovered the 1000th pulsar to be found within our Galaxy since the first few were discovered in Cambridge in 1967.
The team of researchers, comprised of astronomers from the UK, Australia, Italy and the USA, have been surveying the plane of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, for new radio pulsars using the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The powerful new "multibeam" receiver was built as a joint venture between engineers at the Australia Telescope National Facility and the University of Manchester's Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories, Jodrell Bank, funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
The receiver gives the telescope 13 beams capable of scanning the sky simultaneously and, as Professor Andrew Lyne of the University of Manchester, explained, "It's like having over a dozen giant radio telescopes operating at once". As a result, the system requires 13 sets of sophisticated data acquisition systems, one for each beam, which were largely developed and built by the UK group. Following initial detection at Parkes, confirmation and follow-up observations for many of the new pulsars are being made with the 76-metre Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank.
Thanks to this new, state-of-the-art system, the survey is discovering new pulsars at a rate more than 10 times greater than any previous search has achieved - about one for every hour of observing time. It has already added more than 200 new pulsars to the nearly 800 known when the survey began about a year ago. By the end of the survey, in around a year or so's time, it is expected that over 600 additional pulsars will have been discovered.
A pulsar is the collapsed core of a massive star that has ended its life in a supernova explosion. Weighing more than our Sun, yet only 20 kilometres across, these incredibly dense objects produce beams of radio waves which sweep round the sky like a lighthouse, often hundreds of times a second. Radio telescopes receive a regular train of pulses as the beam repeatedly crosses the Earth so the objects are observed as a pulsating radio signal.
Pulsars make exceptional clocks, which enable a number of unique astronomical experiments. Some very old pulsars, which have been "spun up" to speeds of over 600 rotations per second by material flowing onto them from a companion star, appear to be rotating so smoothly that they may be even "keep time" more accurately than the best atomic clocks here on Earth. Very precise timing observations of systems in which a pulsar is in orbit around another neutron star have been able to prove the existence of gravitational radiation as predicted by Albert Einstein and have provided very sensitive tests of his theory of General Relativity - the theory of gravitation which supplanted that of Isaac Newton.
The team are hoping that they might soon discover a neutron star in orbit around a black hole. Dr Dick Manchester, leader of the Australian group, explains that "theories predict that around one in a thousand pulsars may be orbiting a black hole. If such a pair were to be found, it would give us the ability to learn far more about black holes, which are such elusive and enigmatic objects."
reference: Nature, vol 394, 23 July 1998, p. 323.
Information on gravitational wave detectors can be found at:
http://www.geo600.uni-hannover.de/
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken their first direct look, in visible light, at a lone neutron star. This offers a unique opportunity to pinpoint its size and to narrow theories about the composition and structure of this bizarre class of gravitationally collapsed, burned out stars.
By successfully characterizing the properties of an isolated neutron star, astrophysicists have an opportunity to better understand the transition matter undergoes when subjected to the extraordinary pressures and temperatures found in the intense gravitational field of a neutron star.
The Hubble results show the star is very hot, and can be no larger than 16.8 miles (28 kilometers) across. These results prove that the object must be a neutron star, for no other known type of object can be this hot and small.
"This puts the neutron star uncomfortably close to the theoretical limit of how small a neutron star should be," says Fred Walter of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "With this observation we can begin to rule out some of the many models of the internal structure of neutron stars." The observation results, made by Walter and Lynn Matthews (also of SUNY), are reported in the Sept. 25 issue of Nature magazine.
Neutron stars, which are created in some supernovae, are so dense because the electrons and protons that form normal matter have been squeezed into neutrons and other exotic subatomic particles. Neutron star matter is the densest form of matter known to exist. (Theoretically, a piece of neutron star surface weighing as much as a fleet of battleships would be small enough to be held in the palm of your hand.)
The Hubble observations, combined with earlier data, promise to help astronomers refine the mathematical description -- called the equation of state -- of the complex transformations matter undergoes at extraordinary densities not found on Earth. Equations of state are well understood for "everyday" matter such as water, which can transition between gaseous, liquid and solid states. But the behavior of matter under extreme temperatures and pressures found on a neutron star, is not well understood.
Several hundred million neutron stars should exist in our galaxy. However, all neutron stars now known have either been found orbiting other stars in X-ray binary systems or emitting machine-gun blasts of radio energy as pulsars (a class of neutron star). The neutron star seen by Hubble is not a member of a binary system, and is not known to pulse at X-ray or radio wavelengths (it has not been detected as a radio source). Pulsars are young neutron stars born with strong magnetic fields; non-pulsing neutron stars may be old, dead pulsars, with ages of more than a million years, or they may never have been pulsars. Only a few lone neutron star candidates have been pinpointed through X-ray observations, and this is the first optical counterpart to be identified.
The first clue that there was a neutron star at this location came in 1992, when the ROSAT (the Roentgen Satellite) found a bright X-ray source without any optical counterpart in optical sky surveys. It drew the attention of astronomers because objects this hot and bright, without counterparts at other wavelengths, are extremely rare.
Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was used in October 1996 to undertake a sensitive search for the optical object, and found a stellar pinpoint of light within only 2 arc seconds (1/900th the diameter of the Moon) of the X-ray position.
Astronomers haven't directly measured the neutron star's distance, but fortunately the neutron star lies in front of a molecular cloud known to be about 400 light-years away in the southern constellation Coronae Australis.
Using the distance to the cloud as an upper limit, the astronomers calculated a diameter by next comparing the neutron star's brightness and color as measured by Hubble, along with X-ray brightness from the ROSAT and EUVE (Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer) satellites.
The object is brightest at X-ray wavelengths. In the two Hubble images, the object is brighter at ultraviolet wavelengths than at visible wavelengths. They concluded they are directly seeing an ultra-compact surface sizzling at about 1.2 million degrees Fahrenheit.
To be so hot, yet so dim (below 25th magnitude in visual light) and relatively close to Earth, the object must be extremely small - -- below the size of a white dwarf, a more common stellar cinder. A hot white dwarf at this magnitude would lie 150,000 light-years away (outside our galaxy) and have 1/70,000th as much X-ray emission.
The 16.8-mile-diameter estimate comes from assuming the neutron star is at the farthest it can be, just in front of the obscuring "wall" of the molecular cloud. If instead the neutron star is significantly closer to us, say midway to the molecular cloud, it would be smaller still, and present an even bigger challenge to the theories of the equation of state of nuclear matter.
Although neutron stars in binary systems allow astronomers to measure their mass, which turn out to be consistent with theory, it is much harder for astronomers to estimate the diameter of neutron stars. Because neutron stars "feed" on their companion stars in these systems, the light does not come exclusively from the surface but from jets, disks and other phenomenon that occur around the star. This can lead to inaccurate size estimates.
Over the next year, planned observation with the Hubble will be used in an attempt to determine exactly how far away and how large the star is.
