AST201H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Gravitational Wave, Black Body, Spiral Galaxy

• School: UTSG
• Department: Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Course: AST201H1
• Professor: Bryan Gaensler

Document Summary

As pulsars are incredibly diicult to slow, they make great clocks. So universal are they that a locaion with pulsars is used to map out the locaion of our solar system on the voyager golden record. Even beyond this, we can make a pulsar iming array. Basically a (natural) telescope the size of a galaxy. Working out pulse imes, we can monitor these: if a gravitaional wave passes through, it"ll distort the ime between us and the pulsars, this means changing the arrival ime of the pulses. If measurements can be made precisely, these pulsars can be used to measure gravitaional waves. As visible light is the same size of dust, we can"t see much with out. Near-infrared light (closer to visible light than far-infrared light) is larger than dust, so we see past most of the dust and see the stars themselves. But in far-infrared light, we see light made by the dust itself.