PULSE@Parkes for professional astronomers

The PULSE@Parkes project is primarily a public outreach and education project. It was started as an outreach component of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) project which has the primary goal of using observations of millisecond pulsars in order to detect gravitational waves. However, the PULSE@Parkes project enables high school students to observe a large variety of pulsars. Some of these are millisecond pulsars that are observed as part of the PPTA project. Other pulsars are observed to support the Fermi mission and the remainder are intrinsically interesting, for instance, they are intermittent pulsars or exhibit "interesting" timing noise properties.

Accessing the observations

The observations are carried out using state-of-the-art instrumentation on the Parkes radio telescope. The raw data and corresponding calibration files are available for download (without any embargo period) from the CSIRO data access portal. The project code for PULSE@Parkes is P595. The data are free to use. We request (but do not demand) a citation to the main PULSE@Parkes publication (Hobbs et al. 2009) if you use these data in your work.

For more information about the pulsar data sets stored in the data access portal, see Hobbs et al. (2011).

What are we studying?

Currently the PULSE@Parkes students and researchers are excited about PSR J1717-4054. This pulsar is an intermittent pulsar that is sometimes "on" during our observations, sometimes "off" and sometimes we see if turn on or off. We are currently processing the PULSE@Parkes data sets in order to try and improve our understanding of this switching process. A paper using PULSE@Parkes data on this topic has recently been accepted for publication by MNRAS: ADS link.

If you wish to learn more or would like to make sure that you are informed of project developments then please contact:

Robert Hollow
PULSE@Parkes coordinator
robert.hollow (at) csiro.au
(02) 9372 4247