I started work on the Accelerated Pulsar Search project during the summer of 2011. My work consists of creating an automated pipeline that can process radio data and present a list of candidates that may be pulsars.
Currently, the pipeline is being outfitted to process data taken of the Kepler field. This is the area of the sky in which the Kepler spacecraft is searching for exoplanets.
This project may be used in the future to search for pulsars in the galactic center, in close proximity to Sgr A*. Sgr A* is the bright radio source at the center of the Milky Way galaxy associated with the supermassive black hole located there. So far, no pulsars have been found close to the galactic center (in the inner 500 parsecs around Sgr A*). Pulsars should theoretically be present in the galactic center, but various factors have made searching for them in that area difficult.
Pulsars (short for pulsating stars) are somewhat like cosmic lighthouses. They are highly magnetized neutron stars that are rotating and emitting charged particles along their field lines. Like a lighthouse sweeping its light beam, when a pulsar’s beam of charged particles falls on our line of sight, we can detect a spike in radio. Since pulsars are rotating at a very regular rate, we can detect spikes taking place extremely regularly, resulting in a pulsating star.
Searching for pulsars essentially consists of searching for this chracteristic kind of signal. So the key to search for pulsars is looking for a repeating signal. This can be done with Fourier transforms.
However, it is not always that simple. If a pulsar were right next door to us (well, not quite literally, since that would be highly dangerous and odd, but more as in the local stellar neighborhood), this method would work fine. But pulsars tend to be far away, and space is not quite completely empty. There is a large amount of dust in the interstellar medium and all the dust between the pulsar and our radio telescopes smears out the signal.
Pulsars are predicted to exist in the galactic center, but so far, none have been found. There are a few reasons for this.
Duncan Lorimer and Michael Kramer: Handbook of Pulsar Astronomy.
Please note that this page describes an ongoing project. Therefore, the page may not be complete, coherent, and/or an accurate indicator of my work. You have been warned…