The Extreme Side of Pulsars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)

Presented by Sarah Burke-Spolaor and Lina Levin on 19th February 2010.Pulsars are the compact cores of dead stars that periodically flash radio beams at Earth. The regularity of their flashing makes them somewhat like highly accurate clocks--however not all pulsars are very well behaved. This lecture will give a background to pulsar astronomy and detail the extreme behaviours that some of these enigmatic stars exhibit. New, bizarre classes of pulsars are regularly being discovered, and we will present hot-off-the-press discoveries that have been made by an international team of astronomers that includes members of the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.