Radio Observations of Pulsars

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AST 0206205PI NicePulsars are strongly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars, the collapsed remnants of supernova explosions. They are extraordinarily stable natural clocks, in some cases approaching or exceeding the long-term stabilities of the best man-made clocks. Well over 1000 pulsars are now known, and several dozen of them are gravitationally bound to another star, with orbital velocities up to a thousandth of the speed of light. For these and many other reasons,high-precision observations of pulsars offer unique opportunities for research in stellar evolution, gravitation physics, cosmology, fundamental astrometry, and even time-keeping metrology.This project will extend and improve a series of very-high precision timing measurements of binary and millisecond pulsars as refined tests of relativistic effects, and in the search for perturbations in pulse times series due to passing gravitational waves. They will also search the sky for new pulsars, particularly those with very short periods, and they will accumulate timing data for more than 100 slow pulsars, as a service to observers at other wavelengths and to study pulsar rotation irregularities.***