What's up with Pulsar J1713+0747? (English) Muffin, or something strange?
Image Credit: Great British Bake Off/PBS/BBC
Welcome to the latest post of the Pulsars and Profiteroles Project! In this post, I'll talk about my experiences with a breakfast classic and also about a classic pulsar....which has been misbehaving lately!
Baking fancy things is fun, but I also love making things like bread and other simple bakes, things that you see all the time in stores but few people rarely do homemade. These were actually fairly simple to make, and turned out great!
The recipe is a fairly simple enriched dough ("enriched" meaning it was made with things besides yeast, flour, and water), made with strong flour (which is bread flour in the US), yeast, salt, sugar, butter, egg, and milk. The dough comes together fairly easily and you have to knead it for ~10 minutes. It then rises for ~an hour and after it has risen, you roll it out and cut it. I have a bunch of circle cookie cutters, so I chose one of the biggest ones and cut out a bunch of circles roughly the size of English muffins you can get in the store. English muffins aren't actually cooked in the oven, they're cooked in a pan! The trick is to make sure you roll the dough out thick enough to have a good-sized muffin but thin enough so that they actually cook. If you've ever gotten an English muffin out of a package, you'll probably notice that they're dusted with a yellowish grain/powder, and that's semolina flour, a course grain used in making pasta! You can usually find it at the grocery store but if you didn't want to use it, regular flour would work fine! After cutting the shapes and dusting with semolina (or flour), the next step is to proof (let them rise) again. The recipe says to cook them on a hot plate or griddle but I used a cast iron pan and that worked just fine. You cook them for 5-6 minutes on each side and then let them cool. I made the mistake of making some of my muffins too thick so they were a bit doughy in the middle, but rolling them out a bit thinner would have solved that. Overall, a successful bake!
Number of times my hands cramped up while kneading: 1
Difficulty of the bake: 4/10
Weird ingredients used: semolina flour
Kitchen destruction factor: 3/10
English muffins are a solid breakfast staple (at least in the US), and anyone who knows pulsars will tell you that pulsar J1713+0747 ("J1713" for short) is a good pulsar; it is a very bright pulsar and consistent in its rotation. It's used in pulsar timing arrays. I'll do a full post about timing arrays but in short, we can look for gravitational waves by looking at the light waves given off by the lighthouse-like pulsars. Pulsars rotate very periodically so we can predict exactly when the pulse will get to us by obtaining the time of arrival of the pulses ("timing" the pulsars), and we model that. If we noticed deviations from our predictions over long time periods, it could be the signature of gravitational waves. Timing arrays like J1713 mostly because it's bright, and because it's consistent. This past summer, however, it started misbehaving...if you map the energy from the pulsar over time, you'll get a "pulse profile" (check out the first entry in the series, "Core, Cones, and Cherry Cake" to learn more). J1713's has been very stable....but this past summer, its average profile changed quite a bit, and a new component appeared. This is a pulsar we rely on for our timing arrays, and the average profile should be very stable....but all of a sudden it's misbehaving? What happened? Did something come in front of the pulsar and make the profile change? Is there a big clump of magnetic material between us and the pulsar that's causing this? How will it affect the timing of this pulsar? Nobody really knows, and it hasn't gone back to its normal profile! Telescopes around the world are working on monitoring this pulsar to try to pin down exactly what is causing it to misbehave!
Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned for more pulsar science/GBBO bakes!
English muffin recipe here.
Baking fancy things is fun, but I also love making things like bread and other simple bakes, things that you see all the time in stores but few people rarely do homemade. These were actually fairly simple to make, and turned out great!
The recipe is a fairly simple enriched dough ("enriched" meaning it was made with things besides yeast, flour, and water), made with strong flour (which is bread flour in the US), yeast, salt, sugar, butter, egg, and milk. The dough comes together fairly easily and you have to knead it for ~10 minutes. It then rises for ~an hour and after it has risen, you roll it out and cut it. I have a bunch of circle cookie cutters, so I chose one of the biggest ones and cut out a bunch of circles roughly the size of English muffins you can get in the store. English muffins aren't actually cooked in the oven, they're cooked in a pan! The trick is to make sure you roll the dough out thick enough to have a good-sized muffin but thin enough so that they actually cook. If you've ever gotten an English muffin out of a package, you'll probably notice that they're dusted with a yellowish grain/powder, and that's semolina flour, a course grain used in making pasta! You can usually find it at the grocery store but if you didn't want to use it, regular flour would work fine! After cutting the shapes and dusting with semolina (or flour), the next step is to proof (let them rise) again. The recipe says to cook them on a hot plate or griddle but I used a cast iron pan and that worked just fine. You cook them for 5-6 minutes on each side and then let them cool. I made the mistake of making some of my muffins too thick so they were a bit doughy in the middle, but rolling them out a bit thinner would have solved that. Overall, a successful bake!
Number of times my hands cramped up while kneading: 1
Difficulty of the bake: 4/10
Weird ingredients used: semolina flour
Kitchen destruction factor: 3/10
English muffins are a solid breakfast staple (at least in the US), and anyone who knows pulsars will tell you that pulsar J1713+0747 ("J1713" for short) is a good pulsar; it is a very bright pulsar and consistent in its rotation. It's used in pulsar timing arrays. I'll do a full post about timing arrays but in short, we can look for gravitational waves by looking at the light waves given off by the lighthouse-like pulsars. Pulsars rotate very periodically so we can predict exactly when the pulse will get to us by obtaining the time of arrival of the pulses ("timing" the pulsars), and we model that. If we noticed deviations from our predictions over long time periods, it could be the signature of gravitational waves. Timing arrays like J1713 mostly because it's bright, and because it's consistent. This past summer, however, it started misbehaving...if you map the energy from the pulsar over time, you'll get a "pulse profile" (check out the first entry in the series, "Core, Cones, and Cherry Cake" to learn more). J1713's has been very stable....but this past summer, its average profile changed quite a bit, and a new component appeared. This is a pulsar we rely on for our timing arrays, and the average profile should be very stable....but all of a sudden it's misbehaving? What happened? Did something come in front of the pulsar and make the profile change? Is there a big clump of magnetic material between us and the pulsar that's causing this? How will it affect the timing of this pulsar? Nobody really knows, and it hasn't gone back to its normal profile! Telescopes around the world are working on monitoring this pulsar to try to pin down exactly what is causing it to misbehave!
Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned for more pulsar science/GBBO bakes!
English muffin recipe here.
