Daniel Whiteson

It's really an incredible piece of science.

Built out of the pulsars.

Okay.

Just to quickly explain what a pulsar is.

Cause, cause there, those are amazing.

Yeah.

And, um,

when when talking about pulsars i start to feel like maybe we don't even understand time completely because because how quickly they rotate and all that so so so what are they and how do you use that to detect anything yeah so pulsars are neutron stars and you know stars have a life cycle they burn fusion happens within them eventually they use up their fuel

Sometimes if they're big enough, they turn into black holes or they turn into white dwarves.

If they're not big enough to turn into a black hole, they can also turn into neutron stars, which are just a hot, dense clump of stuff spinning really, really fast.

Really dense, you know, like a teaspoon of neutron star weighs an incredible amount.

I don't have the number at my fingertips.

It's super dense matter.

Pulsars are a kind of neutron star that have a very strong beam of material shooting up from the poles.

So neutron stars have a magnetic field and the way that like we see the Northern Lights, this is particles from space that get funneled by our magnetic field up to the North Pole and down to the South Pole.

Really cool.

The inverse can also happen.

If you're emitting a beam of particles, your magnetic field will turn that into a beam that comes from the North and the South Pole.

Ah.

And so if you have a neutron star and it's spinning and it's got a magnetic field that's not aligned with the spin of the neutron star, just like our magnetic field is not perfectly aligned with how the Earth spins, then you have a beam and that beam is sweeping through space, right?