Hi José!

Thanks for describing radio-astronomy! I think I understand the radio wave part of it, but the pulsar half is a little confusing. Is this kinda what is going on???

The star dies, explodes, dissapears, but leaves behind radio waves so that scientists can "track" it and learn more about the way our universe works?

Jamie Jamie,

Pulsars were discovered by accident, with a radiotelescope. What we know from direct observation is that they emit lots of radio energy in a tightly focused beam, and that the pulses that we observe are the moments during which the beam points in our direction. Think of them as lighthouses. In fact, they emit all kinds of energy in addition to radio waves, including light in this beam, but they are generally too faint to be seen with an optical telescope.

The beam comes from the fact that pulsars have very strong magnetic fields (larger than we can create in the lab) and that they rotate very fast (some pulsars rotate so fast that the surface at the equator moves at one tenth of the speed of light). The combined effect is that of a dynamo, where the voltage created at the magnetic poles is so large that it produces all kinds of particles and emissions (hence the light and radio waves). Hence the beam.

Let me know if you need more details about any of this, or if you have other questions.

Cheers,José

Hi José!

What is a good visual aide I can use during my project presentation?

Thanks,Jamie

Hi Jamie,

I would expect you to show some astronomical pictures: a radiotelescope, some optical images of pulsar neighborhoods, things like that. If you are going to talk about pulsars, then you can also play an audio tape of three pulsars that is quite startling, which you can find.

José Very Large Array José,

Hi! How are you? I have my project finished, I'm just waiting for my teacher to let me know when I'm supposed to present it.

I started with Karl Jansky and Grote Reber, giving a little bit of history as well as including some pictures of their telescopes that I downloaded off the internet. Then I described the telescopes (with a picture) and the graphs/charts. After that I included a slide on the VLA-Goldstone system. (What does VLA stand for?) Then a bit about what radioastronomy is and when it began to develop.

Thanks,
Jamie

Jamie,

Congrats! It must feel good to be done, with only the final presentation left. What you have prepared sounds good. I hope you are ready and that it all goes well.

VLA stands for Very Large Array. They have a web site at www.vla.nrao.edu/ if you are interested one day. It's where I worked for two years before going into oil exploration with Schlumberger. They and other observatories like Arecibo (www.naic.edu) have summer internships for seniors in high school.

Cheers and good luck,
José

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