Description:

Title: But wait! There’s more!: A Wealth of Science from Millisecond Pulsars 

Speaker: Scott Ransom, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Abstract: Pulsars are some of physics and astrophysics’ most exoticobjects, and they have already earned two Nobel Prizes. We currentlyknow of about 2500 of them in our Galaxy, but a small subset, themillisecond pulsars (MSPs), are truly remarkable. These systems arenotoriously hard to detect, yet their numbers have more than doubledin the past 4 years via surveys using the world’s most sensitivetelescopes, new instrumentation, and huge amounts of computing.Specialized “timing” observations of these systems, accounting foreach and every one of the billions of rotations of the stars, areproviding fantastic results. In this talk I’ll focus on the efforts todirectly detect gravitational waves from super-massive black holebinaries and some surprising new physics opportunities from a uniquetriple system consisting of an MSP orbited by two compact white dwarfstars.

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Keywords: Physics, Astronomy