Audio recording of the pulsar PSR J1023+0038

This is an observation of the pulsar PSR J1023 00387 with Arecibo at 327 MHz. I simply removed the effect of interstellar dispersion and turned the power measurements into audio samples (with some mild filtering). The whine you hear is the pulsar itself, spinning at 592 Hz; the fading in and out is mysterious, but we think it’s wisps of gas drifting across our line of sight. The video shows the average pulse profile, over short segments (moving, green) and over the whole time (still, gray).