Detection of parabolic arc helps locate pulsar scattering screen

Millisecond pulsars are precise clocks provided by nature. By measuring pulse arrival times of many such pulsars distributed over the sky – a pulsar timing array (PTA) – astronomers are hoping to detect long-period gravitational waves, as produced in super-massive...

CHIPS: The Cosmological HI Power Spectrum Estimator

Exploring the neutral hydrogen from the first billion years of the Universe provides a wealth of information about the ionisation state, spatial structure and temperature of the intergalactic medium and the growth of the first stars, galaxies and black holes in the...

Radio-loud ultracool dwarfs allow analysis of magnetic fields

The group of lowest mass stars and brown dwarfs are collectively called ultracool dwarfs. A number of these objects are sources of both burst and quiescent radio emission. The radio bursts are sometimes found to occur periodically on the timescale of the rotation of...

Sports statistics inspired “Starfish” visualisation of SAMI data

Imagine you are a galaxy floating through space. You know more or less how luminous you are, how large, how massive. But how do you compare to your peers? Whether galaxies get status anxiety or not, this question is very interesting for astrophysicists, and the...

The fastest spinning White Dwarf?

The fastest spinning known pulsar rotates at a rate of 716 Hz (i.e. 716 rotations per second), the slowest takes 8.5 seconds to complete one rotation. Rotating White Dwarfs are much slower, AE Aqr being the fastest and taking 33 seconds for one rotation, while the...