Pulsar observations at millimetre wavelengths
Abstract
Detecting and studying pulsars above a few GHz in the radio band is challenging due to the typical faintness of pulsar radio emission, their steep spectra, and the lack of observatories with sufficient sensitivity operating at high frequency ranges. Despite the difficulty, the observations of pulsars at high radio frequencies are valuable because they can help us to understand the radio emission process, complete a census of the Galactic pulsar population, and possibly discover the elusive population in the Galactic Centre, where low-frequency observations have problems due to the strong scattering. During the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, the availability of sensitive instrumentation allowed for the detection of a small sample of pulsars above 10 GHz, and for the first time in the millimetre band. Recently, new attempts between 3 and 1 mm (~86 - 300 GHz) have resulted in the detections of a pulsar and a magnetar up to the highest radio frequencies to date, reaching 291 GHz (1.03 mm). The efforts continue, and the advent of new or upgraded millimetre facilities like the IRAM 30-m, NOEMA, the LMT, and ALMA, warrants a new era of high-sensitivity millimetre pulsar astronomy in the upcoming years.
- Publication:
-
Pulsar Astrophysics the Next Fifty Years
- Pub Date:
- August 2018
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S1743921317009085
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1806.10617
- Bibcode:
- 2018IAUS..337...92T
- Keywords:
-
- pulsars: general;
- radiation mechanisms: nonthermal;
- Galaxy: center;
- telescopes;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- 85-06
- E-Print:
- 4 pages. Published in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium 337 Pulsar Astrophysics - The Next 50 Years