PULSARS

Discovery of Pulsars:

The skies have always fascinated mankind. Man has derived many
things by looking at the skies .He has built a treasure house of ideas from the
skies .One of the most prominent objects in the night sky are the stars .They
stand out due to their sheer number .Philosophers from the ancient times had
predicted that there was no way to learn about stars from earth, they were
thought to be god’s creation that could never be understood.

Mankind has always looked upon to do the impossible ,the

observations of Trycho Brae ,Kepler coupled with the mathematics of
Newton paved the way for the understanding the stars .Newton for the first
time allowed us to predict the path of celestial bodies .All this began in the
16th century ,the rest is history.

After this breakthrough there was steady development in physics the

next revolution was started in the1 9th century by a clerk Albert Einstein .He
changed the view of the universe by fixing constraints on the maximum
speed of an object in this universe .He went a step ahead of Newton and
using radically new non-Euclidean geometry (developed by Riemann and
taught to Einstein by Lorenz) to describe our world. He also introduced time
as a dimension along with the other three dimensions .This theory gave birth
to the other wonder of physics quantum mechanics .Even though Einstein
opposed it’s ideas it was powerful enough to explain the small(stars) and the
very big(stars).

These theories revolutionized our understanding of the celestial bodies

to a greater extent .We could learn about the stars, we could build
instruments to measure a particular property and from this derive more
information about the celestial bodies .The theories first predicted all
properties of the celestial bodies and the experiments confirmed it later. We
had the power to know the past, present and future of the heavens. On of
such fascinating heavenly bodies are pulsars .They like all great discoveries
and inventions were discovered by accident and by the keen observation of
the experimenter .Here in the next few pages we present this fascinating
story about the DISCOVERY OF PULSARS by S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

In the middle of 1960 a new technique called interplanetary

scintillations had been discovered. It is the apparent fluctuation in the
intensity of radio emission from a compact radio source .It is caused by the
diffraction of radio waves as they pass through the turbulent solar wind in
the inter-planetary space. A professor at the Cambridge University by name
Anthony Hewish realized that some of the astronomical objects such as
quasars are compact radio sources and hence he could detect quasars by
looking for the scintillations .At this time he was joined by Jocelyn Bell as a
PhD student.
A huge telescope covering an area of 4.5 acres was built for the purpose
.Over a thousand antennas were setup using 120 miles of cables! It was built
at a cost of 15000 pounds and took 2 years for completion.

Bell was assigned the task of operating the telescope and analyzing
the data from it .This project was supervised by Hewish .The telescope
operated on 4 beams simultaneously and scanned the sky between the
declinations +50’ and -10’ once every four days .It produced 96 feet of chart
paper as output every day !

Bell started analyzed the data manually ,she did not use the computers
as they were not sure if the telescope was working properly .Also it is easier
for humans to analyze the data from charts than for the computer’s moreover
the computers at that were not as developed as they are today.

After analyzing the first 100 feet of data Bell saw the scintillations .she
could identify scintillating sources .After 2 months she started seeing scruffs
on the paper .These scruffs were strange neither did they look like man-
made nor like the ones expected from the stars .These had been seen in the
earlier data too.

This strange ‘object’ interested Bell she started looking for them almost
every day .One fine day towards the end of October the source just
vanished , there were no scruffs .She skipped the observations for a day and
found the scruff on the chart the next day .In the month of November Bell
stayed close to the receiver to take observations of the ‘object’ She found
periodic pulses in the chart .After removing the paper she discovered that the
pulses were coming with a constant time gap .The time gap was found to be
11/3 seconds .Immediately Bell contacted Hewish ,he brushed it off saying
that it might be a man-made object. But Bell not being well versed in the
history of stars couldn’t realize why the object couldn’t be a star .Hewish
was also interested in the object and went to the observatory to observe the
pulses for himself. The object appeared again at transit time!! After two or
three observations he realized that the object was following sidereal time,
i.e. the object must be outside the Earth! This object couldn’t be one orbiting
the earth .Since it pulsed every 11/3 seconds they suspected it to be a man
made signal .But it also kept a sidereal time the only other option was that it
could be some reflected signal from the moon or effects of the metal factory
that was close by.
But all of them were not convincing .They were forced to believe that the
object
 was outside the earth
 Was spinning with a time period of 11/3 seconds
 Could not be a star
 Could not be human-source
 Couldn’t be a radar signal reflected by the moon
 Couldn’t be an isolated noise signal
 These data put up the question about who was sending these signals
and pointed to earth.
 This pulsating data was verified by a different telescope operated by
Scott and Collins, this eliminated instrumental defect .The dispersion of the
signal was measured by John Pilkington and he established that the signal
was coming from outside the solar system but from our Galaxy!!

These murky data forced them to conclude that some alien was
sending the signals .If an alien was sending the signal by pointing the
antenna towards us we expect him to be in orbital motion round another
star .His planet would be revolving round the star. Hewish started analyzing
the data looking for Doppler shifts .He only found Doppler shift to prove
that the earth was moving around the sun and hence was in orbital motion
around it .The object was not moving around any other object .It was
produced signals as if it itself were a star !.

Everyone in the project couldn’t make any sense of these data .They
had no proof to completely eliminate natural radio sources .Neither could
they conclusively say that they had detected aliens .With these conflicting
ideas Bell once again began analyzing her recordings which had piled up
due to these special observations .During Christmas time Bell was analyzing
data from a different part of the sky .It was a cold night and after the
instruments finally switched on she detected the another scruff ,an entirely
different scruff with pulses produced at an interval of 1.2 seconds .They had
a new source .She immediately left a recording in Hewish’ office and went
home happily knowing that there were no aliens since it was most unlikely
for 2 aliens would choose the same uncommon frequency being used by
Bell , trying to signal earth .
 During the vacations Hewish did all the work for Bell. He put in new
charts ,ink in the ink wells and also piled up charts for analysis by Bell
.After the vacations Bell came back to analyze the loads of data .She found
two more scruffs! She then began to look at all her data once again but
didn’t find any more such sources, none as powerful as these four.

With all this data at hand they submitted a paper to NATURE at the
end of January announcing these strange objects to the world. At about this
time all observations were stopped and Bell started writing her thesis for her
PhD

A few days before the paper was published Hewish gave a seminar on
the objects. Every astronomer in Cambridge was present there .Fred Hoyle,
who was present in the seminar remarked that the objects couldn’t be white
dwarfs and could more likely be the remnants of a supernova.

Astrophysicists around the world came to know about these objects

from these articles .They soon realized that the objects could be rapidly
spinning neutron stars!!These had been predicted a long time ago and their
discovery had been due for 30 years!

A rapidly spinning neutron star can project a beam of radio waves and
scan throughout the sky this is responsible for the pulses. The pulses are
produced due to difference in the axis of rotation and magnetic fields of the
neutrons stars .The strong magnetic field (~1012 Gauss) can accelerate
electrons to relativistic speeds and these produce the radiation .The rapid
rotation of the neutron stars will compress them. They become flat and have
a large bulge. Chandrasekhar had solved the problem of dynamics of
rotating bodies and it comes into play here.

The object was named’ PULSAR’, it stood for ‘pulsating radio star’.
Soon a Nobel Prize was given to Hewish for this discovery, strangely Bell
was left out since she was only a student doing the work assigned by
Hewish. Bell did not feel sad about it .Here we present an excerpt from
Bell’s paper which proves this:

“That was how my part in the proceedings ended. I finally finished the chart analysis,
measured the angular diameters of a number of radio sources, and wrote my thesis. (The
pulsars went in an appendix.) Then I moved out of the field to another part of the country,
to get married. It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize
awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I
would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student
are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who
has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases
where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault
of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too.
Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research
students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.
Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not! “
Here is a picture of Jocelyn Bell with the antenna in the background

After this phenomenal discovery over 1500 pulsars have been discovered till
date .A large amount of data about Pulsars has been amassed. We know
intricate details about its working we are in position where we can predict
the birth and death of these objects

In the next few pages we present a few fascinating facts about these
fascinating objects.
FACTS ABOUT PULSARS:

 Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars

 There are now more than 500 pulsars known in the Galaxy

 The Crab pulsar and most of the rest of the pulsars are slowly, slowly
slowing down. This was the solution to the mystery of the power
source for the Crab

 The pulsar dynamo is more powerful than all our power plant’s
combined

 There are sometime glitches in the spin-down with a sudden increase

in rotation rate. This is thought to be the equivalent of an earthquake
where the crust of the neutron star settles a little bit, decreasing the
radius and moment of inertia.

 Most pulsars are traveling a high speeds through the Galaxy, and
many are exceeding escape velocity. This is though to be due to tiny
asymmetries in the Supernova explosion and recoil.

 Pulsars typically do not have visible counterparts (exception: Crab

Pulsar!)

 Pulsars are frequently found at the centers of Supernova Remnants.

 Pulsars will slowly spin down (they are losing energy putting out all
those pulses of radio light!). As they spin down, their magnetic fields
become weaker, making their radio emission (or pulse) weak. At some
point, their emissions become too weak to be detected.

 All Pulsars are Neutron stars.

 All Neutron Stars are NOT Pulsars

 Astronomers at Columbia University used the Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer to find the youngest pulsar yet - a hot,
spinning, highly-magnetized infant no more than ten miles
across, born in a massive star explosion about 700 years ago.

 Other known pulsars, in comparison, are thousands to millions

of years old. This pulsar, in the supernova remnant Kes 75, is
about 300 years younger than the Crab pulsar, which used to
be the youngest known.

 The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project is an exciting five-year

project aiming to directly detect gravity waves from super massive
black holes

 Pulsars produce a beam which is similar to a LASER beam

 Pulsars are most often and most easily observed at radio frequencies
in the range 0.4 GHz to 2 GHz.

 Pulsars violate the black-body radiation and equilibrium laws