I am so very excited to share this story. Def. a career highlight!

Having the opportunity to sit down and have a one-on-one candid chat with the woman who discovered pulsars and changed the course of astrophysics, leading to me being extremely passionate about this topic and eventually moving into a career of pulsar astronomy. Yeah, this was big.

I hope you enjoy this interview, where Prof. Bell Burnell offers some personal insight into the history of the big discovery as well as the legacy of one of astronomy’s most iconic and influential figures.

What an honour it is to tell this story!

https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/interview-dame-professor-jocelyn-bell-burnell

📸 University of Cambridge

#SpaceAustralia #RadioAstronomy #Pulsars #JocelynBellBurnell #Astrophysics #Science #Astrodon

A personal milestone ✅

I’m incredibly proud to share that my first-ever, first-author paper has been accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA)!

Last week I got to share this work with the pulsar community at the Sardinia Pulsar Conference too.

This project has been at the very heart of my PhD journey so far - a deep, four-year analysis into an unusual and still-mysterious profile change event in one of the most stable and widely used pulsars, PSR J1713+0747. It first appeared on my radar in early 2021 and, since then, it’s been a fascinating and humbling experience trying to unravel what really happened.

In pulsar timing, we rely on the long-term stability of millisecond pulsars to search for phenomena like nanohertz gravitational waves using pulsar timing arrays. But what happens when that stability falters?

This paper explores that very question - examining what changed on this millisecond pulsar, how the polarisation evolved, and what it might mean for the future of precision timing efforts as we prepare for a new generation of ultra-sensitive telescopes.

Seeing this work now out in the world - contributing to the scientific conversation is something I’ve dreamt of for a long time (the last notch to feel like I have fully moved into my science career!). I hope it helps our community better understand the complex and wild behaviour of these exotic stellar clocks.

Read my feature article on SpaceAustralia.com below - and if you have questions about the research, I’d love to chat!

https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/pulsar-threw-tantrum

📸 R. Mandow et al. 2025

#Pulsars #RadioAstronomy #Astrophysics #SpaceAustralia #Astrodon

I built a more accurate Galactic GPS for aliens to find us!

In the 1970s, the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft were launched into deep space - each carrying a message from Earth in the form of plaques and golden records. These included a now-famous diagram: the pulsar map, originally proposed by Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake.

It uses the positions and spin periods of 14 pulsars to show where we are in the galaxy, effectively a cosmic return address.

But there’s a catch: the original map used canonical pulsars, which we now know can glitch and show timing instabilities. Back then, millisecond pulsars hadn’t yet been discovered (they came in the early '80s), so they weren’t included.

As someone studying millisecond pulsars and their long-term timing stability for my PhD, I decided to write some code to rebuild this iconic map - with a little upgrade.

Enter: the Millisecond Pulsar Map.

This version features:

- A top-down view of the Galaxy, with a central measuring bar showing our distance (8 kiloparsecs) from the Galactic Centre.
- Radial lines showing the distance to each millisecond pulsar. These can be measured against the central measuring bar to work out this distance
- Binary encodings for each pulsar's spin period and spin-down rate. These parameters will remain much more stable over the long term.
- A decoding scale to interpret the binary inscriptions.

With 40+ years of high-precision timing data, millisecond pulsars are far more stable than their slower cousins - making them ideal for building a map that could stand the test of cosmic time.

This also highlights how millisecond pulsars could be used as an intergalactic GPS network (because these stable pulsars are like cosmic clocks distributed across the sky). This might be an application for future spacecraft to navigate around the Solar System. Have a read of this article for how we are already building this technology now: https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/breaking-free-shackles-terrestrial-time

So, if some distant civilisation stumbles upon this new pulsar map ... well, they’ll know exactly where to find us.

The question is: do we really want to leave our full galactic home address out there?!

#Pulsars#RadioAstronomy#Astrophysics#GPS #Astrodon

I built a more accurate Galactic GPS for aliens to find us!

In the 1970s, the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft were launched into deep space - each carrying a message from Earth in the form of plaques and golden records. These included a now-famous diagram: the pulsar map, originally proposed by Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake.

It uses the positions and spin periods of 14 pulsars to show where we are in the galaxy, effectively a cosmic return address.

But there’s a catch: the original map used canonical pulsars, which we now know can glitch and show timing instabilities. Back then, millisecond pulsars hadn’t yet been discovered (they came in the early '80s), so they weren’t included.

As someone studying millisecond pulsars and their long-term timing stability for my PhD, I decided to write some code to rebuild this iconic map - with a little upgrade.

Enter: the Millisecond Pulsar Map.

This version features:

- A top-down view of the Galaxy, with a central measuring bar showing our distance (8 kiloparsecs) from the Galactic Centre.
- Radial lines showing the distance to each millisecond pulsar. These can be measured against the central measuring bar to work out this distance
- Binary encodings for each pulsar's spin period and spin-down rate. These parameters will remain much more stable over the long term.
- A decoding scale to interpret the binary inscriptions.

With 40+ years of high-precision timing data, millisecond pulsars are far more stable than their slower cousins - making them ideal for building a map that could stand the test of cosmic time.

This also highlights how millisecond pulsars could be used as an intergalactic GPS network (because these stable pulsars are like cosmic clocks distributed across the sky). This might be an application for future spacecraft to navigate around the Solar System. Have a read of this article for how we are already building this technology now: https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/breaking-free-shackles-terrestrial-time

So, if some distant civilisation stumbles upon this new pulsar map ... well, they’ll know exactly where to find us.

The question is: do we really want to leave our full galactic home address out there?!

#Pulsars#RadioAstronomy#Astrophysics#GPS #Astrodon