Currently on my last ever scheduled observation of my problem child pulsar.
Bittersweet moment - I’ll miss observing it but also I’ve done soooo many hours of observations.
Data coming down at Murriyang (Parkes) and I’ve logged in from home.
It’s being extra nice tonight!
Have covered a full year of high cadence observing with the problem child - I got awarded the time on my telescope during my Masters and have carried through to my PhD.
Very excited to now be processing this data, for the very project I started!
This might be interesting to those of you following the story of the stochastic nanohertz-frequency regime gravitational wave background. A follow on from the big announcement at the end of June.
The IPTA third data release is currently in the works!
Been playing with a little Python script I’m writing that shows a 3D map of the millisecond pulsars observed by our team (PPTA), relative to Earth.
This vid shows the perspective of looking inwards from about 15,000 light years from Earth (blue dot) with surrounding millisecond pulsars (red dots) based on their RA + Dec + distance.
Another Murriyang (Parkes radio telescope) observation under my belt tonight.
Nearing the end of the semester and almost a year of the project I set up to learn more about my problem child pulsar - a highly magnetised, rapidly rotating neutron star that threw its toys out of the pram.
I’ve already started the analysis (see my next post below) but it’s gonna take a while to get all the data ready.
These are webcam images through our observing portal.
📺 Tune into ABC Catalyst tonight (8:30pm) to check out our team and story on converting data from
Space into sounds (sonification) in Astronomy.
That’s my boss (the awesome Dr George Hobbs) riding on our beautiful Murriyang (Parkes radio telescope).
A while back I wrote a piece for #SpaceAustralia on the importance of sonification, in particular, to make Astronomy more accessible and inclusive to extended audiences. It's an excellent topic of science but requires a lot of ableism (vision) to mostly participate in.
But sonification can help change this - as human audio capability is amazing!
I’ll be giving an online talk about my fav and all-round weirdo space objects - pulsars! All ages welcome and will feature some basics along with some sciencey content + a little bit about my current research.
Thanks to the Astro. Society of Victoria for this opportunity!
Event requires rego but is free. Broadcast on YouTube/FB/Twitch. Please come along if you’re free.
Another great ALMA image: a group of researchers led by ProfessorXX studied the triple system IRAS 04239+2436 on the radio signals of sulfur monoxide (SO) and studied the arms generated in that kind of interaction, and compared them with simulations, and the agreement was fantastic.
A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.
In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!
The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.
Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!
The power of multiwavelength astronomy in action: A research group led by Philipp Weber of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH) and Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) used ALMA to check on a young star, V960 Mon. Beyond the dust detectable with SPHERE, ALMA showed spiral arms of gas that are fragmenting, and have masses that can be progenitors of future giant planets.
I can't tell if we are having another #twitterMigration or not, things seem more chill this time. But I fell away after the last one, so a good time circle back and check in anyway...
How's everybody doing?
Finding yer peeps, or still feeling in the dark?
Any questions about logistics or culture? I will either answer or boost.
👇Also, mastodonians, drop your favorite soothing hashtags and fun bots for new folks to explore.
"The Parkes radio telescope Murriyang, which helped broadcast the moon landing in 1969, has played a central role in another scientific discovery.
CSIRO scientists working at Murriyang have been observing an array of nano hertz frequency pulsars for almost 20 years. They are ripples in space time [gravitational waves] that are nearly the same size as the Milky Way.
Yesterday I gave my first PhD talk at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Science Meeting on my fav millisecond pulsar - PSR J1713+0747.
The pulsar that threw a tantrum!
Millisecond pulsars are used in pulsar timing arrays as they’re considered stable rotators over the long term. That is vote to helping us search for gravitational wave backgrounds - the big news that we announced last week.
But this very well know millisecond pulsar decided to undergo a massive magnetospheric reconfiguration in 2021 - only the second millisecond pulsar that we know off to exhibit this strange behavior!
In my PhD I will be exploring to see why this happened and if other millisecond pulsars might be doing this on a smaller scale. Maybe they’re not do stable, after all … ask me again in three years!
New results show detections of radio energy between 110 and 188 MHz from 47 out of the 68 #Starlink#satellites observed with the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in the Netherlands. This frequency range includes a protected band between 150.05 and 153 MHz specifically allocated to #RadioAstronomy.
My living room as an antenna test chamber 😂 Well, it was a rainy day, couldn’t set it up outside.
I’m testing a 2.4GHz dish, meant for WiFi links, but as it turns out, it has a decent match at 1420MHz so it’s actually usable as a Hydrogen Line radio telescope antenna.
Traversing in front of it, you can see its impedance (S11 for the experts) change. This happens because I’m affecting its near field. In human understandable terms: being sufficiently close to the antenna affects how it performs.
With my newly acquired LNA, this will likely end up being a much more portable Hydrogen Line radio telescope, I have high expectations 😃
"Astronomers have found a background din of exceptionally long-wavelength gravitational waves pervading the cosmos. The cause? Probably supermassive black hole collisions, but more exotic options can’t be ruled out."
And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!
Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!
We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!
I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia
This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!
The smoking gun signature of detection is this violin plot, known as the Hellings & Downs correlation. It tells us that all the pulsars across the sky are showing a correlated signal that is expected to be produced by the gravitational wave background of supermassive black hole binaries.
We're seeing the Universe shake, rattle and rolling!
Interestingly, data from our PPTA paper - the amplitude signal strength is time-dependent, which is not expected if gravitational wave signals are equally isotropic.
Could be a processing issue, or the pulsars (weirdos) OR potentially GWs stronger in one part of the sky! 🤯