Sotiris A. Sanidas is an astronomer and a post-doctoral researcher at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, with expertise in Mathematical Physics, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology.

His main research interests include Pulsars (surveys, timing), Radio Astronomy Instrumentation (monolithic and phased arrays, interferometry), cosmic strings, gravitational waves and cosmology.

He is among the scientists who have discovered two rapidly rotating radio pulsars with the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands by investigating unknown gamma-ray sources uncovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The first pulsar (PSR J1552+5437) rotates 412 times per second. The second pulsar (PSR J0952-0607) rotates 707 times per second, making it the fastest-spinning pulsar in the disk of our Galaxy and the second-fastest known spinning-pulsar overall.

Both pulsars (J1552+5437 and J0952-0607) are unexpectedly bright at the low radio frequencies, and quickly become dimmer at higher radio frequencies. This means that they would probably not have been found at higher radio frequencies where most previous radio telescopes searched for pulsars. Hence, there may be an as-yet unseen population of fast-spinning millisecond pulsars in our Galaxy.

The study titled “LOFAR Discovery of the Fastest-spinning Millisecond Pulsar in the Galactic Field“, led by Dr. Cees Bassa an astrophysicist from the University of Utrecht and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Sotiris Sanidas was born in Athens. He took his doctorate from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester in 2013 and from 2015 he is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam.

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A Greek astronomer in the team that discovered the fastest pulsar in our galaxy