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Some Questions About Pulsars

-- Steve W | September 12, 2021

Question:

I am a retired neuropharmacologist who use to be heavily involved with visible wavelength astronomy but poor health forced me give up that passion. However I switched over to radio astronomy using SDR and converted satellite dishes. I realize it’s no Arecibo but it’s mine.
I realize pulsars are old news but I am working on my own pet project to find pulsars, specifically binary or trinary groups.

My questions are:

1) Has there been any reported trinary pulsar clusters?

2) Is there any group or means to report any odd information, if I was blessed to find something?

3) Is it correct that pulsars emit the equivalent of a sine wave? Versus what might be called pink noise.

4) I am not looking for ET, and no I am not trying to remake the movie COSMOS, but based upon the concept of a primary radio wave source generating multiple harmonic pairs is it potentially feasible for alien civilization to piggyback a signal in the same frequency range as a pulsar? And to make that signal stand out they might do it in a manner to not generate any harmonics so it would stand out—
–
I know I am nuts but I am stupid enough on this subject to possibly ask a new question.

Thanks for your time to reas

-- Steve W

Answer:

1) Has there been any reported trinary pulsar clusters?

I don’t believe so. The closest analog that I am aware of is a pulsar in a twin white dwarf system.

2) Is there any group or means to report any odd information, if I was blessed to find something?

The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers might be interested in your results.

3) Is it correct that pulsars emit the equivalent of a sine wave? Versus what might be called pink noise.

The emission from pulsars appears periodic from our perspective. The “light house” model of the emission from a pulsar is a pretty good description, whereby the emission from the pulsar points in our direction periodically as the pulsar rotates.

I believe that the harmonics in pulsar signals can in some cases be pretty weak, so not detecting harmonics might not be such a clear indicator.

-- Jeff Mangum

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