Rochester Institute of Technology and the Instituto Argentino de
Radioastronomía (IAR) have collaborated to make the first pulsar observations
from South America.
A new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics outlines
how the team upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15
years in order to study pulsars. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars
with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The pulses
they emit carry information about the structure of neutron stars.
Since getting
the radio telescopes operational once again, the team has observed phenomena
including a millisecond pulsar (J0437-4515), a magnetar (XTE J1810-197) and a
glitch in the period of the Vela pulsar (J0835-4510). A glitch is a sudden
change in the rotational period of the neutron star, due to a sort of quake
leading to changes in the pulsar period. This is particularly noticeable in young
pulsars, like Vela.
“We have opened
up the possibility to directly observe and study neutron stars in the deep
southern sky from our lab in the northern hemisphere,” said Carlos Lousto,
professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the Center
for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG). “Those stars are not
directly accessible from radio telescopes in the north because the Earth lies
in between our sight line. We have also implemented a visitor program to and
from Argentina that increases the RIT interactions with Hispanic scientists and
culture.”
The two radio
telescope antennae, each 30 meters in diameter, are located at the IAR
observatory in the Pereyra Iraola provincial park near the city of La Plata,
Argentina. Observations are performed remotely at RIT from the Pulsar
Monitoring in Argentina Data Enabling Network (PuMA-DEN) lab by members of
RIT’s CCRG.
Three years of
work culminated when Professor Manuela Campanelli, director of RIT’s CCRG, and
Professor Gustavo Romero, director of IAR, signed an agreement to exchange
visitors, scientific projects and data. The early findings have the scientists
involved encouraged about pursuing larger goals such as coordinated
multi-wavelength observations with other observatories and studying transient
phenomena such as magnetars, glitches and fast radio burst sources.
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