On January 14th, 2026, Marco Turchetta successfully defended his PhD thesis at NTNU! Thesis title: “Hunting Spider Millisecond Pulsars in the Optical Sky” Trial lecture: “Supernovae” Main supervisor: Manuel Linares Co-supervisor: Karri Koljonen Many thanks to both opponents in the committee (Nathalie Degenaar and Teo Muñoz-Darias) for coming to Trondheim, and for their questions and comments.…
Spider pulsars are known to exhibit orbital modulation of their flux across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to X-rays. Over the past decade, gamma-ray orbital modulation (GOM) has been discovered in a handful of spiders, but its origin remains largely unknown. Because GOM is very subtle, its detection requires high photon statistics and precise…
Compact binary millisecond pulsars, also known as “spiders”, host the most massive neutron stars ever observed to date. Expanding the currently known spider population holds the key to determining the maximum neutron star mass, which has crucial implications for astrophysics, nuclear physics and gravitational wave astronomy. Searching for the variable optical emission of their companions can reveal a radio-obscured population of spiders. In the linked article, we present the results of our COmpact BInary Pulsar…