hardworking pulsar astronomers Jan2011 AO @dstinebr

dstinebr IMPORTANT: listen to this with good headphones or speakers with good bass reproduction. The best part is to hear the pulsar coming booming in over the sub-woofers.

This video was shot in the Arecibo Observatory control room on the morning of 2011 Jan 27. We were observing the strong pulsar, B0950+08, which is about 850 light years from Earth. So, the sounds you hear on this left the pulsar about 850 years before we are recording them! Since the Arecibo Observatory is the world's largest radiotelescope, you are hearing very powerful pulses. The signal is a radio signal (of random noise), but we convert that into an audio signal and send it to the sub-woofers for the fun of it. Our research at Oberlin College involves studying these pulses -- and data like this -- to understand how the gas in interstellar space affects their arrival at Earth. By correcting for the millionth of a second and below time delay we can use pulsar timing to search for gravitational waves. Read more about this at http://nanograv.org/.

updated 13 years ago

hardworking pulsar astronomers Jan2011 AO

dstinebr 2011-01-27 | IMPORTANT: listen to this with good headphones or speakers with good bass reproduction. The best part is to hear the pulsar coming booming in over the sub-woofers.

This video was shot in the Arecibo Observatory control room on the morning of 2011 Jan 27. We were observing the strong pulsar, B0950+08, which is about 850 light years from Earth. So, the sounds you hear on this left the pulsar about 850 years before we are recording them! Since the Arecibo Observatory is the world's largest radiotelescope, you are hearing very powerful pulses. The signal is a radio signal (of random noise), but we convert that into an audio signal and send it to the sub-woofers for the fun of it. Our research at Oberlin College involves studying these pulses -- and data like this -- to understand how the gas in interstellar space affects their arrival at Earth. By correcting for the millionth of a second and below time delay we can use pulsar timing to search for gravitational waves. Read more about this at http://nanograv.org/.