Pulsars at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum

Séminaire IPAG de Lucas Guillemot (LPC2E), jeudi 24 juin 2021, 11h00, IPAG seminar room

Pulsars are highly-magnetized, rapidly-rotating neutron stars born in supernova explosions of massive stars. They produce beams of emission that are swept across the sky periodically, in a similar way as marine lighthouses.

Pulsar timing, at radio wavelengths in particular, finds applications in a wide range of physical and astrophysical domains, from tests of theories of gravity to the study of the Galactic magnetic field, or the search for low frequency gravitational waves, via the timing of ensembles of millisecond pulsars with ultra-stable rotation. A large number of pulsars are also bright gamma-ray sources, and pulsars are the most numerous sources of GeV gamma rays in the Milky Way. Gamma-ray pulsar observations are complementary to radio observations, as they enable us to probe different pulsar populations, and since the energetic budgets at play are vastly larger than in the radio.

In this seminar talk I will present some recent results from pulsar observations, obtained by carrying out radio pulsar timing measurements such as those regularly conducted with the Nançay Radio Telescope in France, or by observing pulsars in GeV gamma rays with the Large Area Telescope on the Fermi satellite.