Brief description Neutron stars contain more mass than the Sun collapsed into the size of a city. Many of these neutron stars rotate hundreds of times per second and emit beams of radio waves that we can detect on Earth, in lighthouse-like fashion. While the radio pulses enable us to detect many of these pulsars, the energy they carry is puny. Some pulsars also emit gamma rays, the most energetic photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. Studying the combined gamma-ray and radio emission from a large sample of pulsars helps us to understand how these mysterious and extreme stars work, and also gives us a clearer picture of their population in our Milky Way Galaxy than is possible simply from radio surveys. In this project, we use the Parkes dish to search for radio pulsations from the locations of gamma ray sources detected with the Fermi satellite. So far the origin of these gamma rays is unknown, but there is a good chance that they arise from pulsars spinning up to 700 times per second.
- Local : csiro:P970