Relativistic binary pulsar B1913+16: Thirty years of observations and analysis

By J. Weisberg, J. Taylor. 2004

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe results derived from thirty years of observations of PSR B1913+16. Together with the Keplerian orbital parameters, measurements of the relativistic periastron advance and a combination of gravitational redshift and time dilation yield the stellar masses with high accuracy. The measured rate of change of orbital period agrees with that expected from the emission of gravitational radiation, according to general relativity, to within about 0.2 percent. Systematic effects depending on the pulsar distance and on poorly known galactic constants now dominate the error budget, so tighter bounds will be difficult to obtain. Geodetic precession of the pulsar spin axis leads to secular changes in pulse shape as the pulsar-observer geometry changes. This effect makes it possible to model the two-dimensional structure of the beam. We find that the beam is elongated in the latitude direction and appears to be pinched in longitude near its center.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06303be8fdf6b0cbd5e2fdbee64992c0b959d11b

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Citations in the corpus

LIGO: The laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (2006, background): “Precise timing of radio pulses emitted by one of the neutron stars, monitored now over several decades, shows that their orbital period is slowly decreasing at just the rate predicted for the general-relativistic emission of GWs [1].”
Massive Gravity (2014, background): “While GWs have not been directly detected via interferometer yet, they have been detected through the spin-down of binary pulsar systems [319, 453, 481].”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “Decades of observation revealed the binary orbit to be shrinking by precisely the amount expected if the system were emitting gravitational waves according to general relativity (Weisberg and Taylor, 2005); Hulse and Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993.”
The basics of gravitational wave theory (2005, background): “For a summary of the most recent data, see figure 1 of [12].”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “pin magnitudes a1 = 0:6 a2 = 0:55, misalignment between spins and orbital angular momentum few degrees, the distance to the source z = 5. The inset shows the signal on a larger data span. error bars (Weisberg and Taylor, 2005). Another double pulsar system, SR J0737-3039 A and B, allows additional t”