Yesterday I gave my first PhD talk at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Science Meeting on my fav millisecond pulsar - PSR J1713+0747.

The pulsar that threw a tantrum!

Millisecond pulsars are used in pulsar timing arrays as they’re considered stable rotators over the long term. That is vote to helping us search for gravitational wave backgrounds - the big news that we announced last week.

But this very well know millisecond pulsar decided to undergo a massive magnetospheric reconfiguration in 2021 - only the second millisecond pulsar that we know off to exhibit this strange behavior!

In my PhD I will be exploring to see why this happened and if other millisecond pulsars might be doing this on a smaller scale. Maybe they’re not so stable after all … ask me again in three years!

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Astrophysics #Pulsars #PulsarTiming #GravitationalWaves