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Originally Posted by bojan
Well, that's my point: The distance between wave fronts of individual consecutive pulses is ~300km for 1millisecond flashes.
This can't possibly be detected.
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It has nothing to do with the period of the pulses. It's the distance travelled by each individual pulse through a medium. Think of the pulse as a cone shape. The diameter of the cone represents the light echo. The longer the cone, the greater the distance travelled in
the medium, the larger the light echo. The fact that there is a small period between each pulse is immaterial, the first pulse emitted forms the outer edge of the light echo. Each successive pulse will lead to a "filled in" light echo.
We don't observe such beasts.
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Despite the fact that rotating beam forms a disk, I still think we would be able to see (in principle) an illuminated ring (or fragments of it), provided the rotating beam is hitting the inside of a slow expanding hollow spherical shell.
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How can this be. The thickness of the disk is very small even after taking into account diffraction effects on the beam. As an observer in the plane of the disk, the best we can hope to see is a small illuminated region on either side of the pulsar, and that is not possible given it is well beyond the resolution of our telescopes.
Regards
Steven