Closing remarks

Extract

This meeting started with a bang, with the announcement of what appears to be another ‘Lorimer burst’. Two more ‘diamond planets’, white dwarf binary companions made of crystalline carbon, quickly followed. This drama in the first session gave way to numerous interesting, surprising results. We still have not found a pulsar orbiting a black hole, but we do have the first triple system with the pulsar in the inner binary and a main sequence star forming the outer part of the binary; it may allow tests of the Equivalence Principle. Another close binary may allow checking for dipolar gravitational radiation. Work on the spin-up of millisecond pulsars is better determining the mass accreted during the spin-up and more sophisticated determination of their ages. Indications of more high mass (~2M_⊙) pulsars will allow constraints to be placed on the Equation of State for a neutron star. As was remarked, ‘We keep finding cool new pulsars wherever we look!’; Duncan Lorimer predicted we would know of 4000 pulsars by 2020, a doubling of the present number.