RELATIVISTIC MEASUREMENTS FROM TIMING THE BINARY PULSAR PSR B1913+16

By J. Weisberg, Yuping Huang. 2016

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present relativistic analyses of 9257 measurements of times-of-arrival from the first binary pulsar, PSR B1913+16, acquired over the last 35 years. The determination of the “Keplerian” orbital elements plus two relativistic terms completely characterizes the binary system, aside from an unknown rotation about the line of sight, leading to a determination of the masses of the pulsar and its companion: 1.438 ± 0.001 M☉ and 1.390 ± 0.001 M☉, respectively. In addition, the complete system characterization allows for the creation of relativistic gravitation test by comparing measured and predicted sizes of various relativistic phenomena. We find that the ratio of the observed orbital period decrease caused by gravitational wave damping (corrected by a kinematic term) to the general relativistic prediction is 0.9983 ± 0.0016, thereby confirms the existence and strength of gravitational radiation as predicted by general relativity. For the first time in this system, we have also successfully measured the two parameters characterizing the Shapiro gravitational propagation delay, and found that their values are consistent with general relativistic predictions. For the first time in any system, we have also measured the relativistic shape correction to the elliptical orbit, δθ, although its intrinsic value is obscured by currently unquantified pulsar emission beam aberration. We have also marginally measured the time derivative of the projected semimajor axis, which, when improved in combination with beam aberration modeling from geodetic precession observations, should ultimately constrain the pulsar’s moment of inertia.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e6aa548cae275fae5be7bf2fc3b89fa80eefbe9

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Citations in the corpus

Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, methodology): “The Yao et al. (2016) DM distance of 5.25 kpc is only half the distance of 9.8 kpc provided by Weisberg et al. (2008) and Weisberg & Huang (2016), based on the Galactic model of Reid et al. (2014).”
The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, background): “…The LIGO Scientific Collaboration et al. 2017), and indirectly via binary-pulsar orbital-decay measurements in the ∼100μHz band (e.g., Kramer et al. 2006; Fonseca et al. 2014; Weisberg & Huang 2016); proposed space-based detectors will be sensitive in the ∼10−2 Hz band (Amaro-Seoane et al. 2017).”
Origin of the heaviest elements: The rapid neutron-capture process (2019, background): “Observed systems suggest timescales of ∼ 10 years for this inspiral (Weisberg and Huang, 2016), but a larger range of timescales is expected, dependent on initial separations and excentricities of the orbit.”