Pulsars: Real Life Star Destroyers

Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Time: 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Presenter: Andrew Sullivan
Location: 1st Floor Program Room

Seating is limited. Registration is recommended. Walk-ins are also welcome.

Astrophysicist Andrew Sullivan will take us deep into the world of pulsars, some of the most extreme objects in the universe. Discover how these rapidly spinning remnants of massive stars generate incredible energy and shed light on the mysteries of our galaxy.

The cosmos is loaded with exotic phenomena straight out of science fiction. Among the most exotic and mysterious objects in the universe are neutron stars. Neutron stars are 10 km sized stars composed almost entirely of neutrons with masses 1-2 times that of the sun, and form when very massive stars explode. These objects are the strongest magnets in the universe, more than 1 million times stronger than a refrigerator magnet. Some very rapidly spinning neutron stars called “pulsars” emit bright pulses of radio waves or gamma-ray radiation once every time they spin. Because of their compact size, strong magnetic fields, and very fast rotation, pulsars create intense radiation which can destroy anything in their paths, including an unsuspecting companion star. In this presentation, we will study these real-life star destroyers: how they form, how they work, and what we can learn from the few thousand pulsars discovered in our galaxy.

About the Presenter: Andrew Sullivan is a theoretical astrophysicist specializing in neutron stars and black holes. He is currently a fourth year graduate student at Stanford University, where he is advised by Roger Romani and Roger Blandford. Before arriving at Stanford, he was an undergraduate student at Columbia University, where he served as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and studied features of merging compact binaries under the mentorship of Szabolcs and Zsuzsanna Marka. Sullivan's research broadly focuses on relativistic outflows produced by these compact objects and the interaction with their environments, although they span all of high-energy astrophysics. He has also studied extragalactic radio jets, gravitational wave sources, and gamma-ray bursts. Andrew Sullivan is a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford and the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources (SCEECS). 

A Sci-Fi September Event