Speaker
Description
Globular clusters (GC) are spherical, self-gravitating collections of stars that orbit our Milky Way. Thanks to their extreme stellar densities, which favor frequent gravitational interactions between the stars, GCs are prolific factories for generating millisecond pulsars, exotic binary systems and pulsars with unusual, and often extreme, properties. All of this makes GCs outstanding laboratories, and their pulsars can be exploited for a large variety of experiments: they can be used to test General Relativity, study binary evolution, probe the cluster's gravitational potential in search of non-luminous matter, detect possible intra-cluster ionized gas, study the Galactic magnetic field, and more.
The advent of the MeerKAT radio telescope, a precursor of the SKA1-mid, has recently given a major upturn in the science of pulsars in GCs. Being 4-6 times more sensitive than the Parkes radio telescope and up to 2 times more sensitive than the Green Bank Telescope, MeerKAT has been providing us with an entirely new view of the southern sky. Since the beginning of our observing programme, started in 2019, 34 new pulsars have been discovered in 11 different clusters. A few of these show interesting characteristics that are worthy of attention. Moreover, several of the previously known pulsars have been re-observed with MeerKAT, resulting in new studies made with unprecedented details.
GCs have also been observed with NenuFAR, an SKA pathfinder. The extremely low frequencies at which this telescope can observe pose several challenges both from an observational and computational standpoint, which need to be overcome to successfully detect the faint and fast pulsar of GCs.
In this talk, I will report on the GC pulsar observing programmes currently ongoing at MeerKAT and NenuFAR. Besides producing high-impact scientific results, these activities are essential to gain the necessary experience to fully exploit the outstanding capabilities that the SKA1-mid and SKA1-low will offer for the science of pulsars in GCs.
| Reasearch area | Pulsars |
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