| Description: | The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a planned multi purpose radio telescope with a collecting area approaching 1 million square metres. One of its 5 Key Science Projects concerns testing General Relativity in the strong field regime, by finding and timing radio pulsars orbiting a black hole. However, performing a thorough search for pulsars with the SKA will be a very hard task, due to the vast baselines of the telescope and the required high time resolution of the observations. Still, given sufficient computation power, an SKA pulsar survey will find many thousands of new pulsars, including exotic ones such as intermittent pulsars, RRATs and millisecond pulsars. The latter will allow the SKA to operate as a gravitational wave detector, by timing and correlating the arrival times of millisecond pulsars down to almost nanosecond accuracy. |
