Supplement to the Open Journal of Astrophysics – “Pulsar Science with the SKAO”

It’s been a busy day at the Open Journal of Astrophysics as we’ve published 12 related papers in the form of our first ever Supplement; officially it is Vol. 8 Supplement Issue 1. The idea of a Supplement is to publish a set of related papers together. I imagine it might be of interest for publishing conference proceedings, etc.

The topic of this Supplement is Pulsar Science with the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and it includes updates to the Science Case for the SKAO, the previous version of which is 10 years old. All the papers are indendependently peer-reviewed, which took some organizing and a lot of time because many potential referees are themselves members of the SKA Pulsar Science Working Group! Anyway, the final versions of all the papers hit the arXiv this morning so I published them all today.

Rather than include all 12 papers in tomorrow’s Saturday update I decided just to show the overlay for the overview of the special issue, which is here:

The following paragraph describes the content of the supplement and includes links to the other 11 papers in the issue.

The large instantaneous sensitivity, a wide frequency coverage and flexible observation modes with large number of beams in the sky are the main features of the upcoming SKA observatory’s two telescopes, the SKA-Low and the SKA-Mid, which are located on two different continents. Owing to these capabilities, the SKAO telescopes are going to be a game-changer for radio astronomy in general and pulsar astronomy in particular. The eleven articles in this special issue on pulsar science with the SKA Observatory describe its impact on different areas of pulsar science. Phase 1 of the rollout of the SKAO telescope is likely to double the known pulsar population in new surveys described in the first three papers (Keane et al. 2025; Abbate et al. 2025; Bagchi et al. 2025). These new discoveries will improve our understanding of the dynamics, evolution and gas content of globular clusters and the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy apart from increasing the samples for each of different kinds of radio emitting neutron stars (Levin et al. 2025). The larger population sample will enhance our understanding of the magneto-ionic interstellar medium (Tiburzi et al. 2025; Xu et al. 2025), the pulsar magnetosphere (Oswald et al. 2025) and pulsar wind nebulae (Gelfand et al. 2025). Moreover, the discovery of exotic neutron star systems will test gravity theory ever more stringently (Krishnan et al. 2025) and will probe fundamental physics at sub-atomic level (Basu et al. 2025). Finally, this enhanced sample is likely to make the sky portrait sharper in nano-Hertz gravitational waves impacting on our understanding of the Universe in a fundamental way (Shannon et al. 2025). In summary, the papers in this special issue describe the way the upcoming SKA Observatory’s telescopes address fundamental physics through the study of pulsars and gravitational waves.

#DiamondOpenAccessPublishing #OpenAccessPublishing #OpenJournalOfAstrophysics #PulsarScience #pulsars #SKAO #SquareKilometreArray #SquareKilometreArrayObservatory #TheOpenJournalOfAstrophysics

Dode satelliet verrast astronomen met een krachtig radiosignaal

Relay-2 stuurde een sterke radio-uitbarsting naar de Aarde die minder dan 30 nanoseconden duurde.

Een afbeelding van de Relay-2 satelliet. Credit: NASA

Iets meer dan een jaar geleden registreerden wetenschappers in Australië een korte uitbarst

https://www.kuuke.nl/dode-satelliet-verrast-astronomen-met-een-krachtig-radiosignaal/

#nasa #pathfinder #radiosignaal #Relay2 #satelliet #SquareKilometreArray #VanAllen

"Using 1,024 of what will eventually be 131,072 radio antennas, the first SKA-Low image shows a tiny sliver of sky dotted with ancient galaxies billions of light-years from Earth.

This first snapshot shows the system works, and will improve dramatically in the coming months and years"

https://theconversation.com/less-than-1-of-the-worlds-biggest-radio-telescope-is-complete-but-its-first-image-reveals-a-sky-dotted-with-ancient-galaxies-252382

#Telescopes #SKA #Cosmology #SquareKilometreArray #Space

This book has triggered some memories on the early involvement of Spain in the SKA development which I documented on LinkedIn, but I will write a thread here about them.

1/11

#SKAO #SKA #SquareKilometreArray #SquareKilometreArrayOrganisation #SquareKilometreArrayObservatory #SPDO #ISPO #RadioAstronomy #HistoryBook #LargeScaleResearchInfrastructures #Spain #SpanishScienceIndustry #ScienceIndustry
https://astrodon.social/@juandesant/112696949499330270

Great book (PDF & EPUB) if you have any interest in the SKA's early history. Really good job from Richard Schilizzi, Ron Ekers, Peter Dewdney, and Phil Crosby on compiling a lot of evidence on the journey to establish the SKA, with what went well, and not so well, with lots of detail and notes.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-51374-9

#SKAO #SKA #SquareKilometreArray #SquareKilometreArrayOrganisation #SquareKilometreArrayObservatory #SPDO #ISPO #RadioAstronomy #HistoryBook #LargeScaleResearchInfrastructures

Australische radiotelescoop vindt mogelijk een polaire ringsterrenstelsel

Een radiotelescoop in Australië heeft onlangs een afbeelding gemaakt van NGC 4632. Dit is een sterrenstelsel dat ongeveer 56 miljoen lichtjaar van ons is verwijderd.

https://www.kuuke.nl/australische-radiotelescoop-vindt-mogelijk-een-polaire-ringsterrenstelsel/

#PolaireRingsterrenstelsel #ska #SquareKilometreArray #sterrenstelsel #WALLABY