Can we accurately measure the distance to a Pulsar?

Question

By measuring the time delay betwen the pulsing from several points we should be able to get acurate distance to the Pulsar.

Since the pulsing affect "travels" a lot fater then the speed of light i guess extra acurate mesurment are needed, and probebly it can't be made on earth.

Do we already have the technology for it and if not how far away the measuring points need to be to be able to do it with the current technology?

Some (relativly) simple data needed to answer:

1. How accurate can the pulsar peek time be measures? (In the current technology, in a fraction of a second).

2. If a pulsar is 1 billion ly away, then what is the maximal peek delta time (meaning two objects that are on the rotation axis) for objects 1 AU apart?

Answer 1

I don't think there are any pulsars at cosmological distances that we can detect.

Your parallax technique would work to determine distance too, but does not count on pulse timing.

A standard technique for gauging pulsar distances is measuring the signal dispersion (the pulse is fairly broadband and the different radio frequencies will have different propogation speeds through plasma) and equating that to a column density of interstellar plasma. If you assume a volume density, then you can calculate the distance.

>Since the pulsing affect "travels" a lot fater then the speed of light

I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to the "light house" effect where the 'end' of the beam sweeps across at faster than the speed of light?

Pulsar periods can be VERY accurately determined, especially when a long time series of measurements are made and an ephemeris is fit to the entire series. The accuracy of an individual peak will naturally be a function of the amount of dispersion in the signal, the bandwidth of your receiver and the signal to noise ratio of the measurement which itself is going to depend on the strength of the pulsar signal, how noisy your system is, how big your antenna is, etc.

Answer 2

I think you have some misconceptions in your mind.

The way astronomers measure distances to stars is by means of photometry and spectrometry.

The triangulation method you describe could only be used if we had several telescopes scattered around the galaxy...