50 years of pulsar astronomy

What started 50 years ago as a ‘smudge’ on paper has flourished into a fundamental field of astrophysics replete with unexpected applications and exciting discoveries. To celebrate the discovery of pulsars, we look at the past, present and future of pulsar astrophysics.

On the 50th anniversary of the discovery of pulsars Jocelyn Bell Burnell reflects on their detection, our current understanding of these stars and the new era of discovery ushered in by next-generation radio observatories.

The Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory has played a fundamental role in pulsar astronomy from the discovery of pulsars until the present day. This Perspective reviews the telescope’s accomplished history in astronomy and the early space race.

Pulsar timing arrays may well be the next type of experiment to detect gravitational waves. Sensitive to lower frequencies than LIGO–Virgo, they will detect the stochastic background of massive binary black hole mergers.

Pulsars — fast-spinning neutron stars — are precision clocks provided by nature. Finding pulsars in the Galactic Centre orbiting Sagittarius A*, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth, will offer unprecedented opportunities to test general relativity and its alternatives.

IAU Symposium 337 was held at Jodrell Bank Observatory in September 2017 to celebrate the past fifty years of pulsar astrophysics and to look forward to the next fifty.

The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is looking for neutron stars and pulsars from its perch on the International Space Station. Keith Gendreau and Zaven Arzoumanian provide an overview of its capabilities.

Optical pulsations from a millisecond pulsar that had transitioned from a rotationally powered regime to an accretion disk state have been detected. The optical emission is likely to be due to electron synchrotron emission in a rotation-powered magnetosphere.

The detection of bright, rapid optical pulsations from pulsar PSR J1023+0038 have provided a surprise for researchers working on neutron stars. This discovery poses more questions than it answers and will spur on future work and instrumentation.

We calculate the continuous nanohertz gravitational-wave emission from individual supermassive black hole binaries and the gravitational-wave background they generate, which will be observable with pulsar timing arrays.

Orbiting supermassive black holes in the centres of nearby galaxies contribute to a gravitational-wave background over the whole sky. Networks of millisecond pulsars are sensitive to this signal. Creating maps of this background using information from known galaxies can help us to project when (and how) we may observe it.