Pulsar Timing and its Application for Navigation and Gravitational Wave Detection

Understand

Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks.

• On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks.
• Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from testing theories of gravity to detecting gravitational waves.
• Also an external reference system suitable for autonomous space navigation can be defined by pulsars, using them as natural navigation beacons, not unlike the use of GPS satellites for navigation on Earth.