@astromattmiles.bsky.social (Swinburne, now Vanderbilt) for his thesis “Millisecond pulsar timing and gravitational wave searches with the MeerKAT radio telescope” supervised by @ryanmshannon.bsky.social has been awarded the Charlene Heisler Prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis in astronomy.

With use of radio interferometers and new search strategies, these slowish transients/periodic sources are being found at increasing rate and bound to have a few/many more surprises in store.

The winner of cover of the year for 2024 is the September cover connected to the Caleb, Lenc et al. paper! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congratulations to all involved, particularly Carl Knox @ozgrav.bsky.social and @csiro.bsky.social #NAstroCoverComp #astronomy

Nice way to commute to a conference.

Our CHIME/Pulsar data imply that a pulsar thought to be very massive... isn't. The previous mass measurement relied on white-dwarf modeling; now we have measured the orbital period decay due to gravitational-wave emission. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2412.02850

MPTA results written up in today's The Age/Morning Herald as well www.smh.com.au/national/a-s... @astromattmiles.bsky.social @pinkastrophysicist.bsky.social

Off to the OzGrav retreat/ECR workshop in Brisbane. I'm on a panel in the ECR workshop tomorrow on "making the most of OzGrav". Hopefully I can deliver some insight!

I made this website for the MeerKAT PTA. Check it out! mpta-gw.github.io

Another day, another PTA result. This from Murriyang: A novel way to search for axion dark matter by looking for fluctuations in polarisation position angle in pulsars arxiv.org/abs/2412.02229

When we started MSP precision timing with MeerKAT in 2018, we knew it would be a fantastic telescope for a pulsar timing array, but did not know when it would become sensitive to gravitational waves. The timing baseline with MeerKAT would always be much shorter than other established PTAs.

For the past few years I've been leading the first gravitational wave searches with the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array (mpta-gw.github.io/index.html). It's been an incredibly rewarding experience, and today the research is published!