David's Pulsar Page

From 1981 through 1985, I was in graduate school in Princeton's Physics Department. For the last two of those years, I was privileged to work with Joe Taylor on pulsars. My thesis research was performed at Arecibo Observatory:

So this is my other telescope. Well, actually, it doesn't really belong to me. I was just lucky enough to be able to use it for a while. The idea was to look for fast pulsars, so-called millisecond pulsars. I'll explain what a millisecond pulsar is, but first you may want to know what a pulsar is. How about if you listen to a few:

PSR 0329+xx is a "standard" pulsar.

PSR 0833+xx is a "young" pulsar, having just recently (well, "recently" in astronomical terms) been a supernova .

PSR 1937+21 , is a millisecond pulsar, in fact the fastest of all known pulsars.

So what's the relevance of all this? Well, I was fortunate to have discovered the third known millisecond pulsar. Its designation is PSR 1855+09, referring to its location in the sky - at 18h 55m Right Ascension, +09 degrees declination. Its period (meaning the time between pulses) is 5.3 milliseconds. It is in orbit around a companion, orbiting every 5 days or so.

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