Neutron stars are extremely stable rotators. The moving “tracker ball” on the pulse profile in the animation shows the relationship between observed intensity and rotational phase of the neutron star. The repetition period of the pulses is therefore simply the rotation period of the neutron star. This acceleration causes the particles to emit electromagnetic radiation, most readily detected at radio frequencies as a sequence of observed pulses produced as the magnetic axis (and hence the radiation beam) crosses the observer’s line of sight each rotation.

We conclude with a brief outlook to the future in § 6.Īs the neutron star spins, charged particles are accelerated out along magnetic field lines in the magnetosphere (depicted by the light blue cones). One application of these exceptional clocks, a sensitive detector of long-period gravitational waves, is discussed in § 5. This leads to robust estimates of the total number of normal and millisecond pulsars (§ 3.3) and relativistic binaries (§ 3.4) in the Galaxy and has implications for the detection of gravitational radiation from these systems. In § 3, we review present understanding in pulsar demography, discussing selection effects and the techniques used to correct for them in the observed sample. We begin in § 2 with an overview of the pulsar phenomenon, the key observed population properties, the origin and evolution of pulsars and an introduction to pulsar search techniques. Several new sections/figures have been added and existing sections reworked and modularized to make the review more self-contained and (hopefully!) easier to read in an html setting. Up-to-date tables of parameters of binary and millisecond pulsars are included as an appendix. Many of the exciting new discoveries from these searches are discussed in this review.

As a result, the sample size is now double what it was in 1997. Since the first version of this article was written back in 1997/8 a number of pulsar surveys using the Parkes radio telescope have discovered almost 700 pulsars. Full size image What’s new in this review?

Wideband with binary editor