Weicong Jing
中文EN

Radio astronomy

Pulsars and the interstellar medium

I use the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to study pulsars. I’m interested in how their radio pulses are produced, and what happens to those pulses as they travel through gas in the Milky Way.

Research in focus

How interstellar gas broadens a pulse

Radio waves take slightly different paths through ionised gas, spreading a short pulse into a tail. In our FAST observations, we found stronger scattering along some sightlines through Galactic spiral arms. PSR J2052+4421g illustrates how we measure a tail and trace its change with frequency.

Figure 1

Pulse profiles across the band

Five profiles of PSR J2052+4421g, from 1422 to 1077 MHz. The fitted broadening time increases from 0.072 to 0.198 rotation periods.
From top to bottom, the observing frequency decreases and the tail of the grey pulse profile grows longer. The dashed red curves show the model fitted to each profile. View full-size figure
Figure 4

How broadening depends on frequency

Five broadening times decrease with frequency. The power-law fit gives a timescale of 100 ± 2 milliseconds at 1 GHz.
Each point comes from a profile fit in Figure 1. Broadening is weaker at higher frequencies. The fitted power law gives a scattering index of 3.60 ± 0.06. View full-size figure
Jing et al., Scattering Profiles of 158 Pulsars · author manuscript, 1 September 2026 (PDF) Explore the research

Selected publications

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