pulsars are rapidly rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars formed during the supernova explosions of massive (в‰і 5вЂ“10 M вЉ™) stars. Although there are still many open questions, the basic model has long been established beyond all reasonable doubt, i.e. Many of the basic observational facts about radio pulsars were established shortly after their discovery in 1967. Up-to-date tables of parameters of binary and millisecond pulsars are included in Appendix A.

We conclude with a brief outlook to the future in Section 5. Our review of pulsar timing in Section 4 covers the basic techniques (see Section 4.2), timing stability (see Section 4.3), binary pulsars (see Section 4.4), and using pulsars as sensitive detectors of long-period gravitational waves (see Section 4.5). This leads to empirical estimates of the total number of normal and millisecond pulsars (see Section 3.3) and relativistic binaries (see Section 3.4) in the Galaxy and has implications for the detection of gravitational radiation from coalescing neutron star binaries which these systems are the progenitors of. In Section 3, we review present understanding in pulsar demography, discussing selection effects and their correction techniques. We begin in Section 2 with an overview of the pulsar phenomenon, the key observed population properties, the origin and evolution of pulsars and the main search strategies. The most exciting new results and discoveries from these searches are discussed in this updated review.

Surveys mostly with the Parkes radio telescope, but also at Green Bank, Arecibo and the Giant Metre Wave Radio Telescope have more than doubled the number of pulsars known back in 1997.

Pulsar research has proceeded at a rapid pace since the first two versions of this article.

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