Pulsars track the Solar wind

Caterina Tiburzi, ASTRON

The dispersive delay of the Solar wind introduces excess noise in high-precision pulsar-timing, which must be removed in order to achieve the accuracy needed to detect, e.g., low-frequency gravitational waves with pulsar timing array experiments. New, highly-sensitive test-bed for Solar wind effect in pulsar timing can be provided by low-frequency observations. In addition to this, the magnetic field of the Solar wind also modifies the polarization properties of pulsars through Faraday rotation. However, this allows us to exploit pulsars to probe the Solar wind in both its electron and magnetic content.