No Arabic abstract
The SKA will be transformational for many areas of science, but in particular for the study of neutron stars and their usage as tools for fundamental physics in the form of radio pulsars. Since the last science case for the SKA, numerous and unexpected advances have been made broadening the science goals even further. With the design of SKA Phase 1 being finalised, it is time to confront the new knowledge in this field, with the prospects promised by this exciting new telescope. While technically challenging, we can build our expectations on recent discoveries and technical developments that have reinforced our previous science goals.
The Square Kilometre Array will revolutionize pulsar studies with its wide field-of-view, wide-band observation and high sensitivity, increasing the number of observable pulsars by more than an order of magnitude. Pulsars are of interest not only for the study of neutron stars themselves but for their usage as tools for probing fundamental physics such as general relativity, gravitational waves and nuclear interaction. In this article, we summarize the activity and interests of SKA-Japan Pulsar Science Working Group, focusing on an investigation of modified gravity theory with the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, gravitational-wave detection from cosmic strings and binary supermassive black holes, a study of the physical state of plasma close to pulsars using giant radio pulses and determination of magnetic field structure of Galaxy with pulsar pairs.
The Square Kilometre Array will be an amazing instrument for pulsar astronomy. While the full SKA will be sensitive enough to detect all pulsars in the Galaxy visible from Earth, already with SKA1, pulsar searches will discover enough pulsars to increase the currently known population by a factor of four, no doubt including a range of amazing unknown sources. Real time processing is needed to deal with the 60 PB of pulsar search data collected per day, using a signal processing pipeline required to perform more than 10 POps. Here we present the suggested design of the pulsar search engine for the SKA and discuss challenges and solutions to the pulsar search venture.
Highlights are presented about the science to be done with SKA. as well as state of the art science already done today with its precursors (MeerKAT, ASKAP) and pathfinders (LOFAR, NenuFAR), with accent on the expected breakthroughs.
The Murchison Widefield Array is a low frequency (80 - 300 MHz) SKA Precursor, comprising 128 aperture array elements (known as tiles) distributed over an area of 3 km diameter. The MWA is located at the extraordinarily radio quiet Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory in the mid-west of Western Australia, the selected home for the Phase 1 and Phase 2 SKA low frequency arrays. The MWA science goals include: 1) detection of fluctuations in the brightness temperature of the diffuse redshifted 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen from the epoch of reionisation; 2) studies of Galactic and extragalactic processes based on deep, confusion-limited surveys of the full sky visible to the array; 3) time domain astrophysics through exploration of the variable radio sky; and 4) solar imaging and characterisation of the heliosphere and ionosphere via propagation effects on background radio source emission. This paper concentrates on the capabilities of the MWA for solar science and summarises some of the solar science results to date, in advance of the initial operation of the final instrument in 2013.
The SKA will discover tens of thousands of pulsars and provide unprecedented data quality on these, as well as the currently known population, due to its unrivalled sensitivity. Here, we outline the state of the art of our understanding of magnetospheric radio emission from pulsars and how we will use the SKA to solve the open problems in pulsar magnetospheric physics.