Over the next few days we are making our first pass at reorganizing the content of the pulsarsearchcollaboratory.com website to make it more user-friendly and logical. We hope you will find these changes useful.

Updates include:
1. General reorganization of content.
2. Clearer instructions on how to join the PSC if you are a teacher or a student (New Pages:For Teachers and For Students)
3. An overhaul of the PSC Training Page which includes a consolidation of the “resources links” to better aid you in becoming prepared to help us discover new pulsars.

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is starting a new round of training for teachers and students. Learn about pulsars from renowned radio astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer, and get your hands on some data! Learn more about the program and join us! Our next online training will begin October 12 with an online meeting with educators, followed by six training modules. This session includes weekly webchats with the astronomers! Don’t miss this!
 

Globular clusters are so cool.  They are really old… globular clusters contain the oldest of stars, and date back to the beginning of our Milky Way, and may be a good place to look for alien civilizations!  And they are dense- hosting a million stars in a volume only 100 light years across. It is this fact that interests astronomers using pulsars as a way to probe the inner structure and origin of these ancient relics.

Globular cluster Terzan 5 is home to 37 known pulsars! Many of these are rapidly spinning pulsars known as millisecond pulsars. Astronomers have bean measuring Terzan 5’s uneven tug of gravity on these pulsars to determine the internal structure of the cluster.

Read more here!

The universe is sending us 10,000 messages every day. You can’t see them. You can’t understand them. But then again, neither can anybody else.

Astrophysics professor Duncan Lorimer was sitting at his desk in Hodges Hall at West Virginia University in early 2007 when one of his undergraduate students walked in. Physics and political science senior David Narkevic had been looking through readouts of radio signals from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. He was looking for more examples of a kind of rotating star—a pulsar—that emits very short radio signals. And he found something.

It was strange. A dark line in a place on the graph that meant it was incredibly far away. If the reading was right, it was possible that the signal was both a billion light years away and a billion years in the past.

Lorimer took a look. And then he put it aside. It probably wasn’t anything. “I kind of told him to go back to work, and I put it in a drawer,” Lorimer said.

Read the rest in WVU Magazine.