Einstein@Home Discovers Fourth Radio Pulsar in Parkes Data
Submitted on 12 Jul 2011 12:35:26 UTC
Einstein@Home has discovered a fourth new radio pulsar in data from the Parkes Multi Beam Pulsar Survey (PMPS)! Congratulations to James Drews (U. of Wisconsin - Madison, USA) and David 'Arax' Peters (Kiel, Germany). Further details about the newly-discovered pulsar may be found on this web page, and will be published in due course.
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home
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Comments
Einstein@Home Discovers Fourth Radio Pulsar in Parkes Data
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WoWï¼So Coolï¼
This is incredible news. Not
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This is incredible news. Not a gravity wave, but at this rate E@H will be in double digit pulsar discoveries in no time!
Discoveries seem to be
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Discoveries seem to be confined in a RA range from 13 to 18. Why?
Tullio
RE: This is incredible
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Thank you -- I'd be delighted to break into the double digits!
Cheers,
Bruce
Director, Einstein@Home
Looking at the current speed
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Looking at the current speed of discoveries no doubt it would be soon.
Wonderful! It is great to see
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Wonderful! It is great to see such solid results coming out of everyone's efforts.
Always in the same RA range,
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Always in the same RA range, as I noticed before.
Tullio
Congratulations! If I did
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Congratulations!
If I did my web query right, new pulsar discoveries were published at a rate of approx 1 / week in 2010. So if this is the approximate rate of discovery at the moment, E@H will have quite a significant share of new discoveries since the ABP/BRP search started, considering it only digests data from one instrument at a time.
CU
HB
RE: Always in the same RA
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Do you think these are reflections of the same source?
RE: RE: Always in the
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Definitely not (different frequencies). Maybe the results are evaluated in an order that correlates to sky coordinates?
CU
HBE
RE: RE: RE: Always in
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I should mention that sky coordinates are absolute, so the narrow RA range points to rather narrow spot on the sky. And we should pay attention that reflections of pulsar's signals may have different frequency because of Doppler's shift when this light comes from the source to to "mirror" and then to the Earth.
OTOH, different forms of impulses show that these signals are most likely from different sources. But this is interesting, why these points are near each other?
My RA is now 267.97 and I see
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My RA is now 267.97 and I see no white bars. If would be interesting to see if in the 13-18 RA range one sees some white bars.
Tullio
The greater variation in
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The greater variation in declination seems to indicate a band, rather than a spot, right? Knowing next to nothing of astronomy, could this be on the plane of the milky way, where the largest number of stars are? More specifically, roughly towards the center of the milky way?
Seems like a cluster, in
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Seems like a cluster, in pattern recognition terms.
Tullio
RE: The greater variation
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Now, that makes a lot of sense !
The galactic center is at coordinates RA 17h45m40.04s, Dec -29° 00' 28.1" .
Because the galactic plane is inclined against the RA/DEC coordinate system, EVERY RA coordinate has an intersection with the Milky Way. However, since our solar system is roughly halfway between the center and the outer spiral arm borders (hmm.."border" is of course a bit fuzzy here), we see many more stars per square degree of sky when looking inside the galaxy near the center, compared to looking outside in the opposite direction. So you are right, one would expect to see Pulsars clustered around ca 18h RA.
CU
HB
Hi everyone, to give you
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Hi everyone,
to give you an impression of where the new PMPS pulsars are on the sky I've made a quick plot.
The area of the plot shows the whole sky, that is the full solid angle. The coordinate system is
the equatorial one (using right ascension and declination), which is the celestial analogue to
our geographic coordinate system.
In the plot, the green dots are all pulsars from the ATNF catalogue. Most of them are radio
pulsars, but there's also a small contribution from other sources. The red stars are the five new
pulsars found so far by Einstein@Home in the re-analysis of the PMPS data.
You can see that the majority of the known pulsars lies along a band in the sky, which is the
plane of our Galaxy, where most of the pulsars are found. The Einstein@Home pulsars lie well
within that band.
Hope that helps to visualise the situation. If you have more questions, please let me know.
Cheers, Benjamin
Einstein@Home Project
[off-topic] Speaking about
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[off-topic]
Speaking about the Right-Ascension-thingy. Everywhere it seems to reference to hours, 0 to 24 for the 360 degree arc, except in the Einstein screen saver, there it is displayed in degrees. Why is that?
[/off-topic]
RE: [off-topic] Speaking
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You're right . Now the about 270 degrees I have seen on my screen would correspond to 18 hours, then on target. Right?
Tullio
RE: Speaking about the
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Internally these numbers are stored and calculated in radians. We thought that for the graphics the representation that would be immediately recognizable would be degrees. Indeed the representation most widely used in astronomy is in hours, but we didn't expect the average E@H participant to be familiar with that.
BM
BM
RE: RE: Speaking about
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Agreed, but because we are not familiar with that, it might not have been immediately obvious that one was measured in degrees and the other in hours.
It would explain why Tullio(we) originally thought it was a rather thight band, 13 to 18 degrees, when, in reality, it was spread over a big portion of the sky, 13 to 18 hours.
I think it's time to abandon
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I think it's time to abandon the program, as those accounts with more resources can contribute their discoveries, we no longer.
RE: I think it's time to
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That's not true. Some discoveries have been made by people who are running very few computers. On the other hand, I'm running a whole fleet of computers, and haven't discovered anything as yet. So, you just never know.
Hallo
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Hallo Alfaro!
An example for, that it is not such you will find here -> here, as Phillip Kählitz has just 10% of your RAC and is much shorter in time with us as you.
About 1,5 years ago I had the same thoughts as you and took a more detailed look into this problem. If you are interested, read this.
By our work we are just playing a sort of lottery. We will not win money, but hopefully a new discovered pulsar. And like in every lottery, if you invest more, you have a higher chance to win. But there is no garanty, that you will win.
I hope you will stay with us.
Kind regards and happy crunching
Martin
ok, I decide to stay
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ok, I decide to stay crunching, the real think is I like this proyect, so is going to be very insingnificat contribution but meabe some cruch could be.
with probably One computer
The way I think of it is that
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The way I think of it is that even a 'negative' result is scientifically important. :-)
Psychologically it's way cool if you are credited as a discoverer, for sure. But much can be made of the distribution of pulsars in the cosmos, and that requires a contrast b/w where they are and where they aren't. Everybody contributes to that mapping. That is : 'we looked at this spot and found nothing' is not the same as 'we haven't looked at this spot'. So the act of looking is valuable regardless of the finding, because you reduce uncertainty.
This is similiar to the earlier gravity wave studies which, while not finding a wave, did put upper bounds on how 'quiet' objects need to be for us to have not heard ( see The Hound Of the Baskervilles ). That in turn constrains models of the objects that produce such waves.
Cheers, Mike.
( edit ) Hypothetical : imagine a universe where pulsars were pretty well everywhere you looked. Suppose you found some spots where they weren't !! That would be the exception, no doubt highly interesting ( why didn't they form there? ), with maybe medals getting awarded for that. As opposed to 'Geez, not another pulsar .....' :-) :-)
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
RE: RE: Speaking about
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But then I have this feeling that there are many of us here that would not be on the chart of the average participants Bernd
*and yes I do agree with you Mike *
Then it may be nice to have a
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Then it may be nice to have a keystroke or sth. to switch between these representations. Any volunteers? Mike?
BM
BM
RE: Then it may be nice to
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Sure! So that's in the screensavers : a key to toggle between RA in hours and degrees? :-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
(See I knew I could find a
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(See I knew I could find a way to keep Mike from just having fun traveling and partying Down Undah every day )
....just doing my part!