Pulsars: Nature’s best clocks

Pulsars: Nature’s best clocks

Since they were serendipitously discovered in 1967 pulsars have proved to be excellent astrophysical tools. They are extremely compact, with a mass of about our Sun squeezed into a radius of just 10 kilometres. They spin up to 700 times a second and emit radio waves from their magnetic poles. These properties make them nature’s best clocks.

Professor Ben Stappers, from the University of Manchester, will discuss how we can use them to undertake tests of Einstein’s theory of gravity and also to study gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes. We are in a golden age of radioastronomy and Prof. Stappers will present results from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa and look forward to the world’s largest radio telescopes being built by the Square Kilometre Array Observatory.

Location: Windsor Building, Royal Holloway, University of London