Monday, August 24, 2015

High Time and Frequency Resolution Capabilities of the Murchison Widefield Array - Pulsar observations

Dear Lovers of The Neutron Stars,

Thank you for your FUN work, it keeps me busy when the Sun and Jupiter do not keep me very busy :)

I sometimes wonder what happens at their very center, where temperatures and pressures are truly MONUMENTAL !!

Pulsars were discovered at 81.5 MHz about 50 years ago and I have been studying them since then.

Professor Tremblay at Curtin University in Perth Western Australia, and about 20 of his collaborators around the world, have been doing wonderful things working with the Murchison Widefield Array, a precursor of the Square Kilometer Array.

They have installed equipment to collect time domain data for a total of ~ 31 MHz bandwidth in ~ 1.3 MHz subbands, spread as desired, between 80 and 300 MHz, and observed 10 pulsars.

Read more about it here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05723

32 references at:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ref_query?bibcode=2015PASA...32....5T&refs=REFERENCES&db_key=AST


Abstract: "The science cases for incorporating high time resolution capabilities into modern radio telescopes are as numerous as they are compelling. Science targets range from exotic sources such as pulsars, to our Sun, to recently detected possible extragalactic bursts of radio emission, the so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs). Originally conceived purely as an imaging telescope, the initial design of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) did not include the ability to access high time and frequency resolution voltage data. However, the flexibility of the MWA's software correlator allowed an off-the-shelf solution for adding this capability. This paper describes the system that records the 100 micro-second and 10 kHz resolution voltage data from the MWA. Example science applications, where this capability is critical, are presented, as well as accompanying commissioning results from this mode to demonstrate verification."
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