Daily Image
07-05-2009
Detection of Giant Pulses from the Crab Pulsar
| Submitter: | Tom Hassall |
| Description: | (On behalf of the LOFAR Pulsar Working Group and ASTRON High-Performance Computing Group) During Pulsar Busy Week 2 the Crab Pulsar was observed for the first time using LOFAR. In the 5 hours that the pulsar was monitored it completed over 50,000 rotations and beamed over 50,000 "pulses" towards Earth. The result of this observation was a very clean folded profile which can be seen on the left hand side of the picture. Some of the individual pulses from the Crab were also detected. Most of the pulses were too weak to detect with the 4 HBA tiles of the LOFAR test station, but occasionally the Crab pulsar emits "giant" pulses. Giant pulses with ten times the mean intensity occur approximately once every 1000 pulses. These were bright enough to be detected and the 5 brightest giant pulses are shown on the right hand side of the picture. When the 18 core stations are completed each one will be 12 times as sensitive as the LOFAR test station. Combining all of these stations will create an array with 216 times more collecting area than the current equipment so the fact that we can already see giant pulses is a very good sign for the LOFAR pulsar survey. |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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