Long-term project observations for project P574 semester 2024OCTS_10

We request time to observe 270 pulsars on a regular basis in order to achieve three main science goals. The first is to understand pulsars: how do they spin down and what disrupts this process, how and why their profiles vary with time, whether they precess or have planetary mass companions, in short all the things that make pulsar timing noisier than the perfect clock. Secondly we want to understand the interstellar medium of our Galaxy through repeated monitoring of dispersion measure, rotation measure and flux density variations in conjunction with scintillation parameters. Finally, we provide these data as a community service both to the high-energy community where we have strong collaborative links (particularly to Fermi) and to the radio pulsar astronomers generally through the CSIRO archive. The project is on-going since 2007, we are (co-)authors on 106 papers arising from the P574 data. The data have contributed to the PhD theses of students from Bordeaux, Manchester, Oxford, Stanford, and Swinburne. We are seeking long-term project status with a view to continuing the project into the SKA era.

为达成三项核心科学目标，我们申请观测时长以定期对270颗脉冲星开展观测。其一，解析脉冲星本质：探究其自转减慢的机制与干扰该过程的因素、脉冲轮廓随时间演化的方式与原因、是否存在进动现象或行星质量伴星——简言之，所有会令脉冲星计时偏离完美时钟精度的影响因素。其二，通过持续监测色散量、旋转量、流量密度的变化并结合闪烁参数，解析银河系星际介质的特性。其三，我们将这些数据作为社区共享服务对外提供：一方面为与我们有着紧密协作联系的高能天体物理共同体（尤其与费米（Fermi）项目团队）提供支持，另一方面通过澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO）档案库面向全体射电脉冲星天文学家开放。本项目自2007年起持续推进，基于P574数据集已产出106篇学术论文，我们作为作者（含共同作者）参与了其中部分论文的研究。该数据集已助力波尔多大学、曼彻斯特大学、牛津大学、斯坦福大学以及斯威本科技大学的学生完成其博士学位论文。我们正申请将本项目纳入长期资助计划，以期将该项目延续至平方千米阵列（Square Kilometre Array, SKA）时代。