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Chapter 8

Pulsar timing

Opening Paragraph
Figures
Further Reading
Available Resources

Opening Paragraph

As we saw in Chapter 2, the clock-like stability of pulsars means that through precise monitoring of pulsar rotations we can study a rich variety of phenomena that affect the propagation of their pulses. While the basic spin and astrometric parameters can be derived for essentially all pulsars, millisecond pulsars are the most useful objects for more exotic applications. Their pulse arrival times can be measured much more precisely than for normal pulsars (see Section 2.1) and their rotation is much smoother, making them intrinsically better clocks. Specifically, they usually do not exhibit rotational instabilities such as `timing noise' (see Section 8.4) and `glitches' (see Section 2.6) known for normal pulsars. In this Chapter, we discuss the main techniques and methodology used to extract the maximum of information from timing observations.

Figures

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Further Reading

Available Resources


TEMPO
TEMPO homepage. Includes manual and installation instructions.

PSRTIME
Documentation.

TIMAPR
TIMAPR is a pulsar timing program for high precision timing data analysis.
References: 1 2

PLOTRES
Local download: lk.f (3k), xlk.f (5k)

RHYTHM
manual

TempoTK
Not yet included

SuperTEMPO
Not yet completed

 
Last updated 12:42 24/11/2004