Radio pulsar – Master – MERATE (LC) – Search for occurrences of coronal mass ejections in the LOFAR and NenuFAR datasets – Tiburzi.

The topic of this thesis project are radio pulsars, that are fast-rotating, highly-magnetised neutron stars generating beams of emission located at the magnetic poles of the stars. As the neutron star rotates, these beams sweep the space and they can be seen by an observer on Earth as a periodic source of radiation — very similarly to cosmic lighthouses.

Scope of the thesis: coronal mass ejections (CME) are releases of magnetised plasma from the Solar corona that can impact the Earth and recombine with the geomagnetic field. It is possible that these ‘bullets’ of plasma intersect the line-of-sight of a pulsar, so that the pulsar emission becomes a serendipitous probe of the internal electron content and magnetic field of the CME. In this project we use decade-long, high-quality pulsar datasets obtained with the low-frequency radio interferometers LOFAR and NenuFAR to search for such intersections, and derive the characteristics of the captured CME.

[Credit image: NASA]