Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz192-pulsars-stripped-bare
Today we’re speaking with Dr. Marcus Lower, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Australia’s National Science Agency, the CSIRO. His research primarily focuses on pulsars … rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. He’s the principal investigator of a Pulsar Timing Project, which uses the CSIRO, Parkes Murriyang radio telescope to understand the long-term behaviour of neutron stars and how they can be used to study the interstellar medium.
Marcus is the lead author in a just-published Nature Astronomy paper using the 64-meter Parkes-Murriyang dish and also the monster 76-meter Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester to reveal really mystifying behaviours of Pulsar XTE J1810-197, which we have never seen anything remotely like this before.
Transcript:
Brendan: Welcome to the Astrophiz Podcasts!
My name is Brendan O ‘Brien and, first of all, we would like to acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on.
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Today we are zooming up to Sydney Australia to bring you the very latest mind-blowing discoveries in pulsar research when we talk with an amazing researcher and team leader Dr Marcus Lower.
Brendan: Hello Marcus!
Marcus: Hello, Brendan.
Brendan: Today, listeners, we’re here on Yorta Yorta and Wallemedegal Land. And I’m speaking with Dr. Marcus Lower, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Australia’s National Science Agency, the CSIRO. His research primarily focuses on pulsars … rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. He’s the principal investigator of a Pulsar Timing Project, which uses the CSIRO, Parkes Murriyang radio telescope to understand the long-term behaviour of neutron stars and how they can be used to study the interstellar medium.
Now, most recently, Marcus has been the lead author in a just-published Nature Astronomy paper using the same 64-meter Parkes-Murriyang dish and also the monster 76-meter Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester to reveal really mystifying behaviours of Pulsar XTE J1810-197, which is emitting abnormal amounts of rapidly changing circular polarization. And we’ll hear from Marcus a bit later about how we have never seen anything remotely like this before.
It’s an amazing discovery. And I noticed that also authoring this paper with Marcus are notable researchers we’ve interviewed previously on Astrophiz, namely your colleagues Drs Manisha Caleb, Shi Dai, Andrew Cameron, and John Sarkissian.
Now, first up, congratulations to you and your whole team Marcus, and your discovery here brings a tantalizing new mystery right out into the limelight.
And thanks for speaking with us today, Marcus.
Marcus: Thank you, Brendan. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.
Brendan: Okay. great. So before we talk about your current research, can you tell us about growing up in Okotoks in Canada before moving to Australia and doing your final school years near Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay please Marcus? And can you tell us how you first became interested in science and space?
Marcus: Yeah, sure. So I actually didn’t live in Okotoks for very long, so most of the things I do remember about living there are mostly the snow. I used to get meters of snow out in Okotoks in Canada. Although, I did develop a bit of an interest in space while I was up there, although I don’t remember exactly when or exactly how. I think most of that really came after moving to Australia and moving to a few places around Australia and settling in Melbourne.
I think I really, really became interested in thinking about pursuing a career as an astronomer after seeing Comet McNaught pass through the inner solar system back in early 2007. I can remember going into Werribee Beach down on the shores of the bay and seeing the comet after sunset and I just was just blown away by just how magnificent it was and I wanted to study how those things kind of work.
But of course that being said … I don’t actually study comets.
Brendan: Fantastic! Yeah, McNaught was a beautiful comet. Fantastic!
Okay, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about your school days and your earliest ambitions and if those earlier ambitions changed and morphed and evolved over time?
Marcus: Yeah, it’s funny. I wasn’t actually the best student. I wasn’t the top of the class.
I tended to aim for ‘good enough …, somewhat to my own detriment. But yes, I definitely still had, you know, throughout my entire time at school; I always had an interest and a love for science.
Very early on, it wasn’t so much astronomy that I was interested in. It was more things like volcanology and meteorology. I mean, I remember for the longest time, I actually wanted to become a volcanologist. And I was very disappointed to find out that Australia doesn’t have any active volcanoes.
Brendan: Yep …
Marcus: But yes, it was really that seeing Comet McNaught back in 2007 that really kind of solidified that “Oh okay astronomy is actually amazing and really cool” … maybe a little bit more cool than looking at rocks and minerals all day.
Brendan: And indeed it is, okay. So after obviously your successful school career, you were awarded your Bachelor of Science degree at Monash University majoring in Astrophysics and Applied Mathematics, and this included an extra honours year where you worked on simulating gravitational wave detections of colliding black holes …and after finishing your undergrad you went on to complete a joint PhD at Swinburne University of Technology and the CSIRO, during which you analysed pulsar data collected by three of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world. And since then, you spent the last two and a half years working as a postdoc research fellow at the CSIRO Marsfield site in Sydney.
Now, currently, you balance your time between running research projects, working with international collaborators in Europe, South Africa and North America … and supporting the operation of the ATNF, the Australia Telescope National Facility, and I’m going to assume you’ve had some amazing mentors and people who’ve influenced your science journey Marcus, and influenced your approach to scienceing the shite out of the cosmos. And we have quite a number of astrophysics undergrads and early career astronomers who we know listen in to Astrophiz …So for them, would you like to introduce some of your guiding stars and tell us how mentors can help to develop a career path in science?
Marcus: Yeah, sure. I’ve been quite privileged in that I’ve had quite a few mentors, both in science and in astronomy, going as far back as being in school. So I had some very, very good teachers who pushed me to do better than I was doing at school. And it really pushed me to pursue my dreams, if that makes any sense.
Brendan: Yep.
Marcus: … And I guess if I was to sort of single out a couple of people, in particular, during my undergrad, at Monash University, there was Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway who was the first year astronomy coordinator at the time. She was a great mentor to me during my first and second years at university.
Another sort of real key mentor in my life in both my undergrad and going into my PhD was Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University, who I actually met before starting my undergrad back in high school. And he was able to give me some very sage career advice and maybe push me towards doing pulsars a little bit later on.
And he’s always been a a very good mentor to me, lots of really helpful advice, and not just in terms of my work, but also in terms of career development and thinking about the future. And he remains a very good collaborator and a mentor to me to this day.
Brendan: Fantastic, I caught up with Duncan Galloway and Matthew Bailes at the TDU conference earlier this year and it was great to see Matthew win the Shaw Prize that was pretty amazing.
The plan for today is to mainly focus on the science by having a quick look at your PhD then hearing about your latest discoveries regarding Pulsar XTE J1810-197.
So first could we get the big picture on your PhD research please? Your thesis is titled “Exploring the magnetosphere and rotational properties of radio pulsars”.
Now, which instruments did you use to probe the properties of pulsars? And did you have a favourite pulsar back then? I’m a bit of a Vela boy myself.
And did you do all the work and gather your data remotely? Or were you on site? And is GitHub a helpful environment for PhD students?
I had a look at your GitHub website and what are the worst and the best things that commonly befall PhD students?
Marcus: Oh, that’s a lot of questions to go through. –
Brendan: Sorry.
Marcus: That’s all right. So my PhD research focused on … on kind of two different aspects of pulsar astronomy.
So it was looking at both the population as a whole and then also looking at individual objects. So in particular, in terms of looking at the population, I really studied how the rotation rates of pulsars change over time and how these changes are kind of correlated with different aspects of pulsars.
So things like how fast that’s spinning down or losing energy to their environment, their ages and magnetic field strengths, and then also looking at strange instantaneous changes in their spin rate, which are related to internal physics going on inside them, but then also, yes, looking at individual pulsars.
A particular object which I think at the time during my PhD was my favorite pulsar there’s a magnetar called Swift J1818.0-1607 …very creative name, which is currently is still the fastest spinning magnetar that we know of.
I managed to write two papers on that object and it’s kind of strange behaviour that it was exhibiting at the time. But then I also, in the last few months of my PhD, did a bit of work on setting something called the double pulsar in the Meerkat radio telescope in South Africa … which is an amazing telescope and an amazing pulsar system.
So in terms of the instruments I used, so for the first bit of my PhD, I mainly used data collected by the Molongolo telescope …
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: … which is located just to the southeast of Canberra here in New South Wales.
It’s unfortunately decommissioned these days, but it had a very long successful career as a radio telescope.
The bulk of the data that I looked at in terms on the magnetar and some of the other younger pulsars that I studied, these were data that were collected using the Parkes Murriyang radio telescope … at the Parkes Observatory. And of course, as I mentioned, I also used a lot of data from the Meerkat radio telescope in South Africa.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: Now, unfortunately, the vast majority of of this data was collected all remotely. The Molongolo data, you didn’t even need a person in the loop to collect this data. It was all completely autonomous.
The telescope would go and figure out which pulsars to look at and go and observe them for you. And all you really ended up in the end was just the data that you needed to then do your pulsar timing and analysis.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: It’s a bit of a similar story with Parkes … it’s a little bit more hands on in terms of actually collecting the data, although again, you’re operating the telescope via a computer screen …
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: … And then Meerkat, it’s in some sense quite similar to Molonglo in that, you know, you request an observation, it goes to an operator who then schedules it instead of a computer, and then you end up with your data that you were after in the end.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: And I use GitHub quite extensively throughout my PhD. I still use it a lot today. It’s really good for saving a backup of all of your computer code.
There’s been a couple of instances both during my PhD and in my current postdoc where I’ve accidentally gone and erased a whole bunch of my own code.
Brendan: Ha!
Marcus: And it was only really because I had a backup on GitHub that I was kind of saved from having to start everything from scratch again.
Brendan: Ha!
Marcus: … that’s also a … a fantastic resource for sharing computer code with people. You know, not just say within your university, but with people overseas and sometimes even people who are not even in science.
It’s also a good way of showing that you’re someone who knows how to write software for computers. In that sense, it’s quite good if people, you know, decide, you know, after doing a PhD or even during a PhD if they decide astronomy is not for them and they want to go into industry.
And then the best, best and worst things are commonly before PhD students.
Doing a PhD is both incredibly rewarding and incredibly fun time. It’s also just really hard and it could also be, you know, quite, you know, people can sometimes struggle when, you know, things are… aren’t kind of going their way, if they didn’t get the data that they wanted, or the data that they’re analyzing is not good enough, or they’re just having difficulties with putting together a model or something to fit their data.
So it has its ups and downs, but in the end, I personally really enjoyed my time as a PhD student, although it was spent two thirds of it in lockdown in Melbourne.
Brendan: Yeah.
Marcus: That aspect of it was not so fun.
Brendan: Yeah. Okay, thanks Marcus. Yes, it was a tough gig back then, not for the faint-hearted.
Okay. Now, just before we put our propeller hats on, can you clear the air for new listeners, and can you briefly tell us the important things we need to know so we can understand those similarities and differences between neutron stars, pulsars, and magnetars. What are they? Are they all the same thing? Tell us about them.
Marcus: So all pulsars and magnetars are neutron stars, but not all neutron stars are pulsars and magnetars.
Brendan: Cool.
Marcus: Pulsars in particular are the rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation above the magnetic poles, and when those beams sweep out throughout our Milky Way galaxy, they cross the Earth, then we can detect a pulsar as a source of radio pulses.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: And those pulsars will live for an extended period of time,
and they slowly lose energy and they will eventually switch off and become a sort of a dead pulsar, if that makes sense.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: Now magnetars, they’re also a type of neutron star … but they tend to spin much more slowly and they lose energy much much quicker than regular pulsars. And this is because they have these incredibly powerful magnetic fields that are anywhere between 1000 to 10 ,000 times stronger than that of a typical pulsar or a typical neutron star.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: And it’s the decay of these incredibly powerful magnetic fields that drives both their really high spin-down rates, but also they’re incredibly strong X -ray and gamma ray emission and potentially even some other radio emission we’ve detected from a handful of these objects.
Brendan: Very cool. Thank you. That does clear the air for us. Okay. Can we go back to your PhD thesis for a second? It’s a great read and you’ve got an interesting quote at the very beginning of your dissertation:
“Magnetars can do anything.” Why did you put that succinct but intriguing quote there at the start of your thesis, Marcus?
Marcus: Well, it’s absolutely true. Magnetars can really do anything in terms of, you know, if you go and study pulsars, anything that a pulsar, you have all these weird and wonderful behaviours that show up in pulsars and all across the population. All those behaviours are seen in magnetars. And we also now know that magnetars can do things like emit enormous gamma ray bursts that can be detected with space telescopes.
And are even the origins of at least some fast radio bursts, including the ones that have been seen from distant galaxies.
Brendan: Fantastic! We’ve interviewed quite a few FRB researchers and it’s a bit like the Holy Grail to find the mechanisms for fast radio bursts.
Now, oh look …just a quick link for all our astrophysics students who are listening. Marcus has created some beautiful diagrams in his thesis that very clearly explain the nature of pulsars, how they evolve, and how radio telescopes are used to observe pulsars. I can’t recommend these diagrams highly enough. They’re fantastic.
And listeners can access his thesis freely at tinyurl DOT com / marcuspulsars … all one word or lower case. I’ll mention this again at the very end.
Okay, let’s move on now to the big ticket item and we come to your amazing work on Pulsar XTE J1810-197.
Now, to help me here, do you have a nickname for it and can you tell us a story about how you first came across it, how you stripped it bare and how and why it’s doing everyone’s head in?
Marcus: So unfortunately, we’re not very creative. We don’t have a good nickname for it. We just tend to call it J1810 for short.
Brendan: Yep, cool.
Marcus: So in terms of how I first came across this object, back in early December 2018, we were suddenly alerted to the fact that that it had switched back on after spending more than a decade in a radio silent state where it wasn’t emitting any radio pulses.
And this is through an Astronomer’s Telegram from our colleagues at the University of Manchester who were looking at it, who had been very patiently looking at it every few days with the Lovell telescope in the United Kingdom.
Brendan: Yep …
Marcus: So the moment we heard it, it had switched back on, we raced to get as much time as we could on Murriyang in order to capture what was going on in this really early outburst phase where the magnetar is at its most active. And it was during this time when it was in this really active state is when we came across this really peculiar radio emission behaviour that it was exhibiting.
So in particular, we were seeing all this massive amounts of circular polarization appearing, whereas back during the previous outburst of this object when it was observed with radio telescopes, it was only really seen to emit linearly polarized radio waves.
So that’s to say the radio waves as they wiggle and oscillate as they travel through space, they only move in an upper down or left to right or some combination of the two directions.
The circular polarization we were seeing means that the radio waves are trapped in sort of like a spiral pattern as they propagate through space.
Brendan: Yep …
Marcus: This was completely mind-boggling. We’d never seen this before and it was a complete mystery at the time as to what was going on.
But thankfully at the time the Murriyang telescope had just undergone a major upgrade. So the engineers and scientists here at CSIRO had just installed a new radio receiver up in the focus of the telescope called the Ultra Wideband Low Frequency Receiver. So this meant that the telescope could now see a much, much broader range of radio frequencies than it could with the previous generation of radio receivers.
And this just happened to take place at the same time just before the magnetar switched back on. And so we’re able to study how the polarization state of the magnetized radio waves were changing not only over time, but also across this huge frequency range, made available by the telescope.
What we found was that the amount of circular polarization and the amount of linear polarization changed both with time and with frequency.
So at the really low frequencies, we were seeing a lot more circular polarization than we were seeing at the really high frequencies.
Brendan: Yep …
Marcus: This was quite exciting because it meant that we were possibly seeing the linearly polarized radio waves from the magnetar being transformed into circularly polarized radio waves, which is something that was long theorized should take place around neutron stars and in particular magnetars, but there were some hints of this in sort of old observations of both 1810 and other magnetars in the years beforehand.
But this was the first time that we had definitively seen this effect taking place in a magnetar.
Brendan: Fantastic, that’s so cool!
Okay, well look, let’s follow up on that. Have any theoreticians been in touch with you? How has your team reacted to the excitement that your paper has generated with this new discovery?
And what happens next, Marcus?
Marcus: So we haven’t had anyone reach out to us just yet about the implications of the results. However, the team that I was working with on the paper did include two of the sort of preeminent astrophysical plasma theorists in the world.
This included Professor Maxim Lyutikov from Purdue University and Sydney University’s own Professor Don Melrose, who really helps me, the poor observer, understand what was actually … what was potentially going on around this magnetar and what was causing all this kind of weird linear to circular conversion behaviour.
Yes, in terms of the team’s incredibly excited now that the paper’s finally out there, although we haven’t heard from anyone just yet about their interpretations of the results … we’re equally awaiting to see what people come up with as their explanation of what’s going on in this object.
In terms of what happens next, we’re continuing to monitor a sample of four magnetars using Murriyang.
Our colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere are also monitoring some of the same magnetars. So we’re in some sense kind of patiently waiting for the next outburst to take place in either one of the magnetars that’s currently not emitting radio waves or even 1810 if it decides to go and do something interesting again.
Brendan: That’s just beautiful science. We’ve got those observations and we’ve got those fantastic questions emanating from your observation. That’s beautiful … Thank you, Marcus.
So now we know very well that science never sits still for long. And I get the idea that you may have a number of research projects running concurrently.
And I see that you and Shi Dai and Simon Johnston have just discovered the first ever millisecond pulsar in the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy.
So we’re very happy to put our propeller heads on again for a short time. So would you like to share with us some details of just one of your research projects that you’re working on right now that’s driving you crazy or astonishingly beautifully exciting?
What’s happening?
Marcus: Yes, I am definitely working on quite a few projects concurrently. Some might say too many.
Brendan: Hah!
Marcus: As much as I would love to talk about this new millisecond pulsar, that paper is still very much under review at the moment, so I’m not gonna say much more. I can’t say much more about it.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: One of the big projects that I’m currently working on as part of the Parkes Young Pulsar Timing Program, which is the project on Murriyang that I manage, is trying to understand the stability of pulsars over a really long time scale, so over many years to many decades.
This project has been observing about 260 pulsars over the last 17 years or so.
Brendan: Cool!
Marcus: And so we’ve been able to sort of really build up a really nice and clear picture of how stable the radio emission is from all of these objects.
So whether the shapes of their pulses are varying either slowly or suddenly over these long time scales. And then also tracking how those changes in their pulse shapes match up against changes in how they’re spinning over time.
So whether they’re spinning over time … so whether events are suddenly, you know, whether they’re occurring at the same time and have related to one another, or in some cases, if they’re not related to each other at all,
… and kind of thinking about what this means in terms of how the neutron stars, magnetic fields, and their surface, their surface all interact with one another.
And yeah, this is an ongoing project and it’s starting to see the finish line with this one. It’s a bit of a journey to get it to where it is today.
Brendan: And pulling out some new understandings at the very end. Thank you, Marcus. Now, I had a brief look at a heap of papers you’ve authored and co-authored up on the ArXiv server … the pre -print server, and I see you’ve worked with some fabulous instruments.
You’ve mentioned the refurbished Molonglo Upmost Array and Meerkat in South Africa and working with the LIGO and the VIRGO gravitational wave instruments.
Now I’ve got a couple of questions. What other instruments are you looking at to do some of that heavy lifting for your research, and what are your thoughts on how the SKA … the square kilometer array is shaping up or perhaps you’re even eyeing off the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope? Is it beckoning you and is infrared data part of your observational arsenal when you’re probing into the behaviours and misbehaviours of pulsars?
Marcus: So one thing I haven’t really looked at is actually objects in the Northern Hemisphere, you know being based here in Australia and using largely Australia -based telescopes. I’ve only really explored pulsars in this bit of our galaxy that we can see from the Southern Hemisphere.
Brendan: Yep.
Marcus: So at some point I would really like to get involved in some projects that use telescopes in the Northern Hemisphere to see a different part of the sky and different objects. Yeah … the Square Kilometer Array or SKA when it comes online is going to be an absolutely incredible telescope.
You know it will be the most sensitive radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and you know it’s going to be able to do all of the great stuff that we’ve been doing so far but even better just simply because of the massive amounts of sensitivity that it’s going to bring to the table.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: Both in terms of the SKA-mid telescope being built out in South Africa and the SKA-low telescope being built out in Western Australia, which CSIRO is supporting the construction of.
Brendan: Yep.
Marcus: Yeah, in terms of going to other wavelengths, I haven’t really thought about doing anything at an infrared or optical wavelengths, except for maybe looking at the occasional star that we might find a pulsar orbiting, and trying to figure out which star in particular a pulsar orbits.
I have worked with some colleagues who use data from X -ray telescopes in particular the NICER telescope on board the International Space Station.
So this is a couple years ago I worked with Dr. George Younes from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States. We both looked at a particular magnetar that had undergone a new outburst.
So I looked at it from the radio side and he looked at it from the X -ray side and he kind of joined forces to sort of understand what was going on with this unusual outburst that went on in this particular magnetar.
I would like to kind of expand my horizons beyond radio astronomy. I would like to understand here how you actually collect the data from these X-ray telescopes or gamma ray telescopes and then kind of turn that into sort of the useful kind of scientific data products that that we can then use to learn more about objects such as pulsars or magnetars.
Brendan: Fantastic. Look, I saw that when your Nature paper was published, it generated such intense interest and there were interviews for you.
I’ve seen a few of your interviews and lots of articles in the mainstream and on social media. Would you like to tell us about your outreach work and is outreach an important part of being an astrophysicist?
Marcus: Yeah, outreach is absolutely an important part of being an astrophysicist. We make all these cool discoveries and it’s important that these discoveries get communicated to the public in a way that’s accessible to them.
Particularly, if those people are the taxpayer who are paying for us to do this amazing research. It’s important that they can kind of see it in some sense a return on their investment,
But it’s also important just in terms of inspiring the next generation of scientists, astronomers, engineers, people going into STEM fields. In terms of my own involvement in outreach, I’m part of the Pulse@Parkes team, which is a high school outreach program where schools and high school students can either come to Marsfield here in person or we join over Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
And we actually let them control the Murriyang radio telescope.
Brendan: Cool!
Marcus: So they get to observe a set of pulsars and get some experiences to what life is like as a radio astronomer.
And then you know they get to… hear about all the cool research that we’re doing both here at CSIRO and at universities around Australia all the different things that we can learn by studying pulsars and then you know they then also have the opportunity to just ask a bunch of astronomers some questions so it can be about have any topic really any if it’s this can be astronomy itself science in general career paths
And it’s a very successful program that’s been running since the early 2000s.
Brendan: Fantastic! And that next generation of scientists, we have to give them as much food as possible to keep ‘em going.
Thank you very much, Marcus. Now, finally, the mic is all yours and you have the opportunity to give us your favourite rant or rave about one of the changes that we face in science, in equity, in representations of diversity, in science denialism … one that I work on … career paths or even your own passion for research or our general human quest for new knowledge which you’re working on.
The microphone’s all yours Marcus.
Marcus: Oh, this is a tough question. There’s many things I could rant about. One thing in particular is this somewhat out-dated view that in order to progress as a researcher and become the best researcher you can be, you have to leave your home country or home city and in some cases even just go overseas and spend time overseas away from friends and family.
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: It’s a quite privileged view to have, you know, how to progress your career as a scientist because it doesn’t take into account a lot of the sort of personal circumstances that people have.
It doesn’t take into account, you know, whether they have the option or the ability to move overseas, particularly, you know, if we’re people located here in Australia … where Australia is really far away from the rest of the world.
It’s also quite outdated in the sense that these days, maybe in the past, going overseas was the only option to really network with people overseas
Brendan: Yep
Marcus: … and form these global collaborations that really drive science forward these days.
However, we now live in the Internet age.
We have many, many options available to us to sort of communicate and form collaborations and form networks with people that oversees international institutes, whether that’s through email or teleconferencing or even attending entire conferences virtually. Or this is sort of lowering of the barrier of entry to sort of forming international networks.
I mean, that’s still sort of somewhat overlooked by in particular, some people in quite senior positions who have permanent positions and don’t have to deal with having to go out into the world.
Hopefully this has all made sense.
Brendan: Yes, it has indeed. Raising those questions doesn’t matter where you are and who you’re with. It’s the questions and the way you approach science that makes all the difference.
Thank you, Marcus.
.Now, is there anything else that we should keep our eye on in the near future? What are you watching out for? And what else is happening in the near future in the world of magnetars and pulsars or the gravitational wave or the FRB cosmos?
What’s on your radar?
Marcus: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, there’s … there’s a lot of research that’s still ongoing at the moment, and particularly in the fields of magnetars and FRBs … as you know, these fields are changing really, really rapidly as we’ve got new telescopes coming online, and we’re discovering more and more FRBs, and new magnetars are appearing and old ones are going back into outburst states.
I don’t think there’s any one thing that you could really keep your eye out for … except maybe another FRB to go off in our own galaxy, that would be quite amazing to see.
I guess I could also add that a few weeks ago that the second half of the fourth observing run of the gravitational wave network has started back up and I guess astronomers are eagerly awaiting the next double neutron star merger so that we can learn a lot more about the physics of neutron stars and in particular, you know, if we’re lucky enough to detect something that’s close enough that we can see a post -merger remnant, which could teach us a lot about the nuclear physics of neutron stars.
Brendan:: Awesome!
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Marcus Lower. On behalf of all of our listeners, and especially from me. It’s been really exciting to be speaking with you and to hear the nitty-gritty of all that fantastic pulsar work that you’re doing. And I’ll make sure to catch up with you at the next TDU conference and a reminder that those great pulsar diagrams are at TinyUrl Dot com / marcuspulsars … all one word, all lower case.
And thank you especially for your generosity and your time. And good luck with all your next research. We’ll be following it very closely.
Thank you, Marcus!
Marcus: Thank you, Brendan. It’s been a wonderful talking to you.
Brendan: And remember, Astrophiz is free, no ads, and unsponsored. But we always recommend that you check out Dr Ian Musgrave’s ‘AstroBlogger’ website to find out what’s up in the night sky.
See you in two weeks. Keep looking up.
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