Carl Gwinn

Carl Gwinn is a radio astronomer who studies pulsars and the propagation of radio waves through the interstellar medium. Ionized interstellar gas scatters radio waves and makes pulsars scintillate. Gwinn uses this scattering to resolve structure far smaller than the diffraction limit of telescopes on Earth.

With very long baseline interferometry and scintillation statistics, he and collaborators measured the size of the Vela pulsar’s radio emission region (1997, 2012). With the RadioAstron space interferometer he found substructure within the scattering disk of the pulsar B0329+54, and he led the discovery of similar substructure in the scattered image of Sgr A*, the black hole at the Galactic center.

Other work treats interstellar scattering as a Lévy flight, and works out the statistics of noise in digitized radio signals.