Are you ready to take your PSC research to the next level?

Join a research teams to perform cutting-edge research in pulsar astrophysics! These teams are composed of both new and veteran researchers and will observe with the 20 m telescope and analyze data through Jupyter notebooks and other tools. Students must have passed the pulsar certification tests and inspected 1000 plots to participate. These projects will result in real, publishable research results!

 

1) Giant Pulse Bonanza

A long-standing puzzle in pulsar astronomy is the origin of giant pulses, narrow blips of radio emission seen in several pulsars. Often tens of hundreds of times as bright as ordinary pulses, the exact mechanism behind them remains unknown. The PSC giant pulse group focuses on giant pulses from the Crab pulsar, an active young pulsar and the best-known giant pulse emitter. We try to answer a variety of questions about giant pulses, focusing predominantly on what could be correlated with the Crab’s giant pulse rate – things like gamma ray emission or glitches, sudden changes in the pulsar’s spin frequency.

We’ve also looked at the statistical properties of giant pulses, how the giant pulse rate appears to change over time, and how the interstellar medium affects our observations. In 2024, we published a paper on some of this work. Future work might focus on giant pulses from different parts of the Crab’s pulse profile, changes in giant pulse rate on short timescales, and observations of other pulsars that emit giant pulses.

As part of the group, students will run observations using the 20m telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, run pipelines to search the data for giant pulses, and write their own code to perform additional analyses. We also regularly read and discuss previously-published papers, to get students more comfortable reading scientific papers and the many interesting nuances of giant pulses.

To learn more about the project, please email Graham Doskoch at gd00010 [at] mix.wvu.edu.

 

2) Advanced timing project
 In this project, we will monitor a bright radio pulsars weekly with the 20m radio telescope at Green Bank to measure their timing parameters like period, period derivative, and position. We will also track changes in their flux densities, pulse profile shapes and single pulse behavior, all of which can vary on short timescales. This will allow us to address interesting scientific questions like whether glitches, or instantaneous changes in spin period, are associated with brighter single pulses. The students will build skills in radio analysis, experience collaborative research environments through interaction with other PSC members, and get the opportunity to present the results of their work at research conferences or PSC events. This research will further explore the capability of a 20-m telescope in studying these exotic sources and result in a publication.

To learn more about this project, please join the "advanced timing'' Slack channel or email Lydia Guertin at lydia.guertin [at] nanograv.org.

3) Pulsar scintillation project

Pulsars “scintillate” as their emission passes through the gas of the interstellar medium on its way to Earth. Due to constructive and destructive interference of their radio waves, this causes variations in the intensity of their detected emission and also in the frequency structure. In this project, we will observe a subset of pulsars with the 20-m telescope at Green Bank to determine how the time and frequency scale of this interference changes with time. This will allow us to compare with models for the interstellar medium and learn both about it and about pulsar velocities. Students will learn basic data reduction and working with Python-based code in a Jupyter notebook environment. We plan for this work to result in a publication!

To learn more about this project, please join the "scintillation'' Slack channel or email Jacob Turner at jacob.turner [at] nanograv.org

Instrumentation Project

For clubs interested in getting involved in more of an engineering project, we have most of the components needed to build a working radio telescope and will provide them free of charge to   eager educational groups. We are interested in developing a network of folks who will build, test, improve and use Horn Antennas to investigate the hydrogen in the Milky Way, and transient events like cosmic rays, and who will participate in a communications platform to share the experience.  We would like to evaluate these horns for a potential future educational grant, so we’ll be asking for your feedback. These horn radio telescopes were developed by WVU engineers working with high school teachers.  You can learn more here, and if interested, please contact Sue Ann Heatherly at sheather@nrao.edu for more information!