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Help us find new pulsars to test Einstein's theory and search for gravitational waves
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About Pulsar Hunters
[Credit Professor Michael Kramer]
Pulsars are among the most extreme objects populating our Universe. Next to black holes, they are the most compact stars that we know of. A single teaspoon of neutron star matter would in fact weigh just as much as all the people on the Earth put together! They are the most powerful known magnets that we have ever found. The strength of their magnetic field can reach more than a million billion times that of the Earth in some cases. They are also the fastest naturally spinning objects in our Universe. Several pulsars are known to spin at more than 500 rotations per second. The beams of radio waves shining from their magnetic poles sweep around the sky so that they flash like cosmic lighthouses.
Pulsars are extremely useful to study some of the fundamental laws of physics: matter at extreme density, theory of gravity (including Einstein's relativity) and even search for gravitational waves. The best pulsars to carry out this science are rare, and so astronomers are always on the lookout for the next, amazing pulsar. Because of they produce a pulse at regular intervals it is possible to detect their very faint beat burried in extremely noisy data. The issue is that human-made interference generates a large amount of signals that look like pulsars. The human eye and brain are extremely agile at telling the two apart.
