A Survey for Sharply Pulsed Emissions

Extract

The discovery of pulsars in 1967 marked the watershed of interest in short-time-scale phenomena in radio astronomy. Ionospheric scintillation on time scales of seconds, interplanetary scintillations at tenths of seconds and solar bursts of similar duration had already been studied. But with pulsars individual pulses contained subpulses of width about 10 ms, and later observations of microstructure were to show that structure with scales of 10—100 μs were present. In other areas searches for the 10—100 ms radio pulses expected to accompany the gravitational wave events resulting from stellar collapses were made, and more recently searches have been made for the radio pulse accompanying the explosion of small black holes (Rees 1977). Work in this area is summarized by O’Sullivan et al. (1978) and Phinney and Taylor (1979).