The S&A pulsar group is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which operates ‘Murriyang’ the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope where the majority of our observations are carried out. We study many aspects of pulsar astronomy including pulsar timing, the origin and evolution of pulsars, pulsar emission properties and mechanisms, scintillation studies and the structure and evolution of supernova remnants.

Our group developed the web-based ATNF Pulsar Catalogue, a comprehensive database of all published pulsars. We also run the PULSE@Parkes outreach program, a program that enables high-school students from around the world to monitor a select number of pulsars in real time.

 

Group members

 

Group activities

• Commissioning the new Parkes CryoPAF receiver and continuing the development of the wideband receivers.
• Studying the origin of Fast Radio Bursts
• Searching for the ‘unknown’ in archival data sets
• Conducting observations for the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA), part of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) global consortia, with the combined objective of detecting the effects of gravitational radiation on the Earth and establishing an alternative time standard based on pulsar observations
• Discovering new pulsars
• Timing young pulsars
• Studying the Galactic distribution and evolution of pulsars and, in particular, using binary pulsars to test gravitational theories such as Einstein’s general theory of relativity
• Understanding what makes radio pulsars work through observations of their single pulses and their polarisation properties
• Using pulsars as probes of the interstellar medium, studying, for example, the structure of the Galactic magnetic field
• Maintaining and updating the ATNF Pulsar Catalogue – contains information on all published pulsars, with complete bibliographic information and intended to serve both professional astronomers and the wider community
• Developing Cloud-based solutions for pulsar data processing
• Managing the flow and ingest of Parkes pulsar data into CSIRO’s Data Access Portal, and assisting with data access for users
• Developing new software for analysing wide band data from the UWL