Physical Society Colloquium

The High Time Resolution Universe survey for Pulsars and Radio Transients

Matthew Bailes

Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing

The first millisecond pulsar was discovered almost 30 years ago, and these enigmatic objects have continued to deliver great advances in our understanding of relativistic gravity and stellar evolution. New advances in digital electronics and supercomputing have enabled new surveys to search large volumes of the Galaxy and are uncovering new objects at hitherto unprecedented rates. Here I describe a new survey with the Parkes radio telescope that has found a large number of millisecond pulsars, including one with a companion just the mass of Jupiter in a two hour orbit. These new pulsars are important in enabling the development of the International Pulsar Timing Array, a Galaxy-dimension gravitational wave detector that uses millisecond pulsars to search for the coalescence of super massive black hole binaries.