In this talk I will report on the MeerKAT key science projects related to pulsars, and on the leading role that the italian scientific community is playing in these programs. I will, in particular, summarise the discoveries (50, at the time of writing, and counting) already done as part of the TRAPUM KSP, a project aimed at searching for new interesting pulsars in a series of targeted...
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...
One of the top science goals for SKA is the study of pulsars, and in particular using pulsars in so-called pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) to detect low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs). The regular monitoring (or timing) of a large number of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) is essential to making a GW detection. Pulsar surveys with SKA1 will reveal a large new population of millisecond pulsars...
Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) are collecting years of data by constantly monitoring the radio emission from the most stable millisecond pulsars (MSPs) across the sky in order to detect variation between the observed time of arrival of each pulse and the one expected from the timing model (i. e. the timing residual) that can be induced by gravitational waves (GWs). This technique, called pulsar...
