Pulsar documentation from Jodrell Bank
25 Aug 2015 23:38:22 UTC
Topic 198203
(moderation:
I always find online pulsar information either a simple 10 line news bite or a complex scientific paper.
Somehow I stumbled onto Jodrell Bank's old distant Learning material here and it has a great few pages on pulsars.
I guess somewhere in the forums in the past it was published.
It looks a little dated around 2005 (they no longer offer these courses) but it is well written and easy reading. I guess some things are better known now.
I learnt...
"the emission region is only a few hundred kilometres across" and "hundred of km above the pulsar" and the distances can be measured accurately.
"a radio telescope can usually observe only at a single frequency at any time" (why?)
"pulsar emission is highly polarised very often up to 100%"
and other stuff.
Pulsar documentation from Jodrell Bank
)
That's all good stuff and will bring you up to speed nicely on these very interesting stellar objects/systems. Mr Kramer and Mr Lorimer are excellent sources. They have literally written the textbook on the topic and Mr Kramer is the main man with the Square Kilometer Array.
As for the frequency thing, it is a question of whether you also want precision in the sky position, signal to noise ratio etc. With finite apertures there are trade-offs eg. b/w localisation ( how well the image of the source is 'focused' ) and bandwidth ( 'color' discrimination ). Generally the resolution of an imaging system improves with aperture and smaller wavelength. Naturally the SKA will go a very long way to reducing these conflicts.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal