Probing the Interstellar Medium by Monitoring Millisecond Pulsar Brightness
Mentor 1
Joe Swiggum
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
27-4-2018 1:00 PM
Description
This research relies on the detection of radio signals emitted from millisecond pulsars, incredibly dense neutron stars that beam light from their magnetic poles as they spin hundreds of times per second. These signals are detected as regular pulses, corresponding to a pulsar’s emission region regularly crossing our line of sight as it spins. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) works to examine millisecond pulsar (MSP) signals in order to detect gravitational waves from a variety of sources, using large radio telescopes in West Virginia and Puerto Rico. The purpose of building the MSP flux density (effective brightness) database is to look for underlying distributions in the flux densities due to the signals’ interaction with the ISM. To run the analysis, I pulled data from NANOGrav’s database to construct my own for a subset of the MSPs. In addition to examining the structure of the ISM, these data also hold strong potential to be used for millisecond pulsar modeling and simulations. In this study I developed models for 10 millisecond pulsars’ underlying flux distributions.
Probing the Interstellar Medium by Monitoring Millisecond Pulsar Brightness
Union Wisconsin Room
This research relies on the detection of radio signals emitted from millisecond pulsars, incredibly dense neutron stars that beam light from their magnetic poles as they spin hundreds of times per second. These signals are detected as regular pulses, corresponding to a pulsar’s emission region regularly crossing our line of sight as it spins. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) works to examine millisecond pulsar (MSP) signals in order to detect gravitational waves from a variety of sources, using large radio telescopes in West Virginia and Puerto Rico. The purpose of building the MSP flux density (effective brightness) database is to look for underlying distributions in the flux densities due to the signals’ interaction with the ISM. To run the analysis, I pulled data from NANOGrav’s database to construct my own for a subset of the MSPs. In addition to examining the structure of the ISM, these data also hold strong potential to be used for millisecond pulsar modeling and simulations. In this study I developed models for 10 millisecond pulsars’ underlying flux distributions.
