Astrophysical fluid dynamics she pulls in her arms. These stars gradually slow down over the eons, but those bodies that are still spinning rapidly may emit radiation that from Earth appears to blink on and off as the star spins, like the beam of light from a turning lighthouse. This "pulsing" appearance gives some neutron stars the name pulsars. After spinning for several million years pulsars are drained of their energy and become normal neutron stars. Few of the known existing neutron stars are pulsars. Only about 1,000 pulsars are known to exist, though there may be hundreds of millions of old neutron
Laser beam profiler centroid of a laser beam can be determined to sub-micrometre accuracy with a laser beam profiler. The laser beam profiler's effective aperture size is three orders of magnitude smaller than that of an iris. Consequently, the ability to define an optical path is 1000 times better when using beam profilers over irises. Applications that need microradian alignment accuracies include earth-to-space communications, earth-to-space ladar, master oscillator to power oscillator alignment, and multi-pass amplifiers. Experimental laser systems benefit from the use of multiple laser beam profilers to characterize the pump beam, the output beam, and the beam shape at intermediate locations in