prof. dr hab. David Blaschke, IFT UWr

50 years discovery of pulsars – precise probes of space, time and matter under extreme conditions

I give an introduction to the fantastic properties of pulsars, cosmic “lighthouses” that were discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell, a young PhD student at that time, by studying signals obtained from a newly constructed radio telescope. Soon after this discovery it became clear that these regular radio signals came from fastly rotating neutron stars, objects that were anticipated by Lev Landau even before the discovery of the neutron in 1932 and described as possible remnants of supernova explosions by Baade and Zwicky in 1934. Meanwhile more than 2500 pulsars are known and in this seminar I will describe some of them which have most remarkable properties that allow us to measure the structure of space-time in our cosmic neighborhood and to better understand the matter under extreme conditions of high densities and strong fields in their interiors. Those conditions we shall recreate for short moments of time in heavy-ion collision experiments of the third generation which are under construction at NICA in Dubna and FAIR in Darmstadt.