Astronomy & Astrophysics Seminar: Exotic Pulsars and Where to Find Them

Zoom: https://tau-ac-il.zoom.us/j/87875748926?pwd=MGh1dk9DeXBxa2FEL0thMVRaaHZGQT09

Abstract:

Radio surveys have been detecting an increasingly large number of millisecond pulsars - rapidly rotating neutron stars that were spun up by mass accretion from a companion star. I will discuss three binary pulsar classes that have emerged over the last decade: black widows, redbacks, and eccentric millisecond pulsars. I will present analytical and numerical evolutionary tracks for these systems and test them using novel direct optical observations from the last couple of years. Despite being rare, these exotic pulsars can teach us about the stellar evolution of a variety of common stars: solitary and binary, on the main sequence and beyond it.

Seminar Organizer: Dr. Iair Arcavi