Abstract:

Imagine trying to follow two voices in a crowded room—your brain naturally separates them, but what if you had to do it mathematically? This is exactly the challenge we face with X-ray pulsars. These cosmic lighthouses beam powerful X-rays into space as they spin, but their light doesn’t come from just one source—it comes from two magnetic poles, blending together in a way that’s almost impossible to untangle.

In this talk, I’ll take you on a journey through the strange world of X-ray pulsars, showing how we observe their flickering light and why their pulse profiles hold hidden secrets. The big mystery? We still don’t know exactly how each pole contributes to what we see. Enter blind source separation—a clever mathematical trick inspired by the “cocktail party problem,” where we try to isolate individual signals from a messy mix. I’ll explain how this technique can help us decode pulsar emission, what its limitations are, and what we’ve learned from applying it to the pulsar Cen X-3.

By the end, you’ll see why these rapidly spinning neutron stars remain one of the most intriguing puzzles in astrophysics—and why solving them is far from simple.