We report here on two years of timing of 168 pulsars using the Parkes radio telescope. The vast majority of these pulsars have spin-down luminosities in excess of 10^34 erg/s and are prime target candidates to be detected in gamma-rays by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. We provide the ephemerides for the ten pulsars being timed at Parkes which have been detected by Fermi in its first year of operation. These ephemerides, in conjunction with the publicly available photon list, can be used to generate gamma-ray profiles from the Fermi archive. We will make the ephemerides of any pulsars of interest available to the community upon request. In addition to the timing ephemerides, we present the parameters for 14 glitches which have occurred in 13 pulsars, seven of which have no previously known glitch history. The Parkes timing programme, in conjunction with Fermi observations, is expected to continue for at least the next four years.
Modification of large water Cherenkov detectors by addition of gadolinium has been proposed. The large cross section for neutron capture on Gd will greatly improve the sensitivity to antielectron neutrinos from supernovae and reactors. A five-year project to build and develop a prototype detector based on Super-Kamiokande (SK) has started. We are performing various studies, including a material soak test in Gd solution, light attenuation length measurements, purification system development, and neutron tagging efficiency measurements using SK data and a Geant4-based simulation. We present an overview of the project and the recent R&D results.
We consider a spherically symmetric and asymptotically flat vacuum solution of the Horava-Lifshitz (HL) gravity that is the analog of the general relativistic Schwarzschild black hole. In the weak-field and slow-motion approximation, we work out the correction to the third Kepler law of a test particle induced by such a solution and compare it to the phenomenologically determined orbital periods of the transiting extrasolar planet HD209458b \virg{Osiris} and of the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039A/B. The upper bounds on the HL adimensional parameter are \omega_0 < = 10^-15 from HD209458b and \omega_0<= 10^-13 from PSR J0737-3039A/B. While the constrain from the pulsar is of the same order of magnitude of the most stringent one retrieved from the perihelion precessions of the inner planets of our solar system (10^-13-10^-11), the one by HD209458b is tighter by two orders of magnitude.
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