About
Astronomer Scott Ransom works on a wide variety of projects that involve finding, timing and exploiting pulsars of various types, using data from many different instruments and at energies from radio waves to gamma-rays.
His main focus is searching for exotic pulsar systems such as millisecond pulsars and binaries. Once these pulsars are identified, he uses them as tools to probe a variety of basic physics, including tests of general relativity; the emission of gravitational waves (and hopefully soon their direct detection, as part of the NANOGrav collaboration); and the physics of matter at supra-nuclear densities. Much of his time is spent working on the state-of-the-art signal-processing instrumentation, high-performance computing and software that pulsar astronomy requires.
Awards
- Research Professor, Astronomy Department, University of Virginia
- Fellow of the American Physical Society
- All Souls College Visiting Fellow, Oxford University
- AAS Helen B. Warner Prize
- Bart J. Bok Prize
Relevant Publications
Pallanca, C. et al. “Radio Timing and Optical Photometry of the Black Widow System PSR J1518+0204C in the Globular Cluster M5.” Astrophys. J 795 (2014).