Pulsars Sound Lower: 120 Beacons of the Southern Sky express

Original: "50-250 MHz Pulsar Census with an SKA-Low prototype station: Spectra and Polarization"
arXiv:2603.11553 · 2026-03-12 · CC BY 4.0 · 2 min
The largest low-frequency pulsar survey has caught 120 cosmic beacons, including 23 never before seen below 150 MHz.

The EDA2 radio telescope in the Australian outback is like a giant ear pressed against the sky. It listens to the cosmos at very low frequencies, from 50 to 250 megahertz, where ordinary telescopes can barely make out anything. This is exactly where pulsars, fast-spinning neutron stars, sound most intriguing: their pulses stretch, distort, and tell us what they encountered along the way.

In this new survey, that ear caught 120 pulsars. For 23 of them, the signal below 150 megahertz was recorded for the first time, and 5 were even heard below 100 megahertz, like spotting a distant lighthouse through thick fog for the first time. Each pulsar was recorded in full, with all the details of its pulse shape and polarization — the characteristics that reveal how the star spins and what its magnetic field is like.

A pulsar is a neutron star the size of a city but heavier than the Sun. It spins once every milliseconds or seconds, and its radio beam, like a searchlight, regularly sweeps across Earth.

But the real value isn't just the new pulsars. On their way to us, radio waves pass through interstellar gas and Earth's ionosphere, which leave their "fingerprints" on the signal. The team measured how much the signal was delayed (the dispersion measure) and how its polarization rotated under the influence of magnetic fields (the rotation measure). For 110 pulsars, they refined the delay; for 40, they measured the rotation. One pulsar, J1453-6413, showed that the rotation changes right during the pulse — something rarely caught.

These data are like a detailed map of road hazards for future observations. When the full SKA-Low antenna array comes online, it will listen to the sky at the same frequencies but be thousands of times more sensitive. For now, EDA2 is charting the course: where to look, what to tune into, and what surprises to expect from cosmic beacons.

The fastest known pulsar spins 716 times per second — faster than a kitchen blender.

In Carl Sagan's novel "Contact," pulsars are used as natural navigation beacons for interstellar travel.

Scientists
Enrico FermiPaul DiracSubrahmanyan ChandrasekharMichael FaradayHendrik LorentzAlbert Einstein
Concepts
radio pulsar pulsar pump probe spectroscopy ultrashort pulse