George Hobbs' home page

Address: Room 95, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, PO Box 76, Epping, NSW, 1710, Australia Email: george.hobbs@csiro.au Position: research scientist, team leader Phone: +61 2 9372 4652

Projects

I am currently the lead for the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project. This project has three primary goals: (1) to detect ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves using pulsars, (2) to create a pulsar-based time scale and (3) to use pulsars to search for unknown objects in our solar system.  Details are available on our webpage and in our initial data release paper.

I am the science lead for the PULSE@Parkes outreach project.  As part of this project, high-school students around the World carry out observations of pulsars using the Parkes radio telescope.  The observations have led to refereed publications and are also used by the students to carry out school projects.  Our webpage relating to this project is here. 

The CSIRO data archive is currently dominated by archival observations of pulsars from the Parkes telescope.  This is the largest archive of pulsar data world-wide and is being used for multiple research projects.  Whereas we previously lost significant amounts of pulsar data, we now have a modern archiving system. We are currently exploring how to link this archive with high performance supercomputing systems.

I enjoy computing projects and have developed the tempo2, psrcat, ptasimulate and pfits software packages that are in common use in the pulsar community.

Highlights of my research to date include:

• development of the tempo2 software package (2006MNRAS.369..655H)
• using a new algorithm to find new pulsars in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae (2016MNRAS.459L..26P)
• writing the first paper using the ASKAP telescope to search for radio transient events (2016MNRAS.456.3948H)
• being involved in the most stringent limit to date on the amplitude of ultra-low-frequency gravitational waves (2015Sci...349.1522S)
• describing how pulsar observations can be used to navigate space craft (2013AdSpR..52.1602D)
• developing the first high-precision pulsar-based time standard (2012MNRAS.427.2780H)
• showing how to carry out pulsar timing in the presence of correlated noise (2011MNRAS.418..561C)
• providing a precise mass of the Jovian system using pulsars (2010ApJ...720L.201C)

Publications

A link to my list of publications sorted by citation number is available here.  As of Februrary 2017, I have a total of 9452 citations in around 180 publications. My top-cited paper has 1150 citations and I have 26 papers with more than 100 citations. My H-factor is 48.

Students

I have supervised (or co-supervised) numerous students for all or parts of their projects and currently lead the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science graduate student program.  An (incomplete) list of my students is given below: