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Interstellar scintillation: A powerful tool for the investigation of radio sources and the interstellar medium

Ziel

The fascination associated with scintillation effects - from the twinkling of the starlight, to the rapid flux variations of interplanetary scintillation, over the wealth of frequency patterns caused by pulsar scintillation, to the dramatic refractive flux modulation of extragalactic sources - has barely faded since the days of their detection. Common to all these appearances of scintillation is the fact, that they require a fine-tuning of the involved parameters. Interstellar scintillation e.g. asks for extreme compact sources to produce the patterns, so that at the beginning only pulsars were known to fulfil this condition. It became evident only recently - in spite of many efforts to detect them - that also extragalactic sources are able to produce scintillation effects.

The required fine tuning of the parameters opens up - vice versa - the possibility, to determine and estimate these parameters just by the observation of scintillation patterns, e.g. to use scintillation as a tool for the investigation of the interstellar medium and of the structure of pulsars and extragalactic sources emitting the wave fronts being scattered by the interstellar medium.

The new situation now that there are two populations of sources available which may be used to investigate the interstellar medium, e.g. the environment of pulsars all over the Galaxy on one side and source structure of extreme small scales on the other side, is in the focus of this proposal. Starting point and first objective will be a systematisation and overview of existing data on interstellar scintillation, including weak and strong scattering, as well as diffractive and refractive scintillation regimes. All these aspects of scintillation are within the scope of the project teams which have access to the most powerful radio telescopes in Europe - Westerbork, Effelsberg, Pushchino - covering the wide frequency range from 100 MHz up to over 10 GHz.

One line of research will concentrate on the medium causing the scintillation effects, the turbulent interstellar plasma. Here the exact shape of the three-dimensional spatial spectrum will be the main point of interest, e.g. the question if the shape of the spectrum is indeed of Kolmogorov type, with or without an inner scale. The next objective will be to clarify how the characteristics of the medium change with position in the Galaxy and what the causal reasons for these changes are. It should be possible, by careful collection and comparison of the existing data to "map" regions of the Galaxy with respect to extraordinary high or low angle scattering. The distribution of the turbulent plasma along the line of sight and the dependence between density and level of turbulence will be investigated and the relationship between the thermal and relativistic electron component of the cooling and expanding plasma around the birthplaces of pulsars.

Full use of the exceptional possibilities of interstellar scintillation to mark objects with extraordinary small scale structure will be made to resolve pulsar magnetospheres and to investigate the structure of extragalatic sources by means of scintillation. A most important objective will be the development of the theory of scintillation with respect to a nearer congruence between observations and predicted quantities, especially since the measurements represent in most cases only badly defined averages instead of statistically fully developed quantities.

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