Colloquium: Finding and Observing Pulsars in the Galactic Centre

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© CC-BY-SA-NC credit: Ralph Eatough

It has been a longstanding goal of pulsar astronomers to find pulsars in the Galactic Centre (GC). Such pulsars can be used for precision tests of gravity, identifying dark matter and direct measurements of the properties of the central black hole — Sgr A* — in its extreme environment. Since 2013 and the detection of PSR J1745–2900 — a magnetar potentially less than one light year from Sgr A* — our understanding of the environment in the GC has changed markedly. In this talk I will discuss recent searches for GC pulsars, updates on the difficulties of their detection and recent observational findings from both PSR J1745–2900 and other GC pulsars.

The image here, taken from Eatough et al. (submitted), shows the field of view of the Effelsberg dish at different frequencies. The background image, taken from Zhao et al. 2016 is a 5.5 GHz JVLA map of the region around Sgr A*.