| Description |
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is filled with very sparse plasma: in the size of space of a carton of milk, there would only be a few electrons and protons! This plasma contains surprising dense clumps (the size of the Earth’s orbit around the sun). While these clumps should be shredded to bits very quickly, we see that they last a long time. One reason the clumps may stay together is that magnetic fields tie it all together. Our Galaxy also contain a special type of star, called a pulsar, that emit flashes of radio waves. These flashes can be used to strobe the plasma, and let us examine the clumps. We are using the Parkes telescope (the best telescope for pulsars in the world) to use pulsars to study the structure of clumps, and try, for the first time, to measure how magnetic the clumps are.
|
ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management