tempo2, a new pulsar timing package ¿ II. The timing model and precision estimates

By Russell T. Edwards, G. Hobbs, R. Manchester. 2006

510 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tempo2 is a new software package for the analysis of pulsar pulse times of arrival. In this paper we describe in detail the timing model used by tempo2, and discuss limitations on the attainable precision. In addition to the intrinsic slow-down behaviour of the pulsar, tempo2 accounts for the effects of a binary orbital motion, the secular motion of the pulsar or binary system, interstellar, Solar system and ionospheric dispersion, observatory motion (including Earth rotation, precession, nutation, polar motion and orbital motion), tropospheric propagation delay, and gravitational time dilation due to binary companions and Solar system bodies. We believe the timing model is accurate in its description of predictable systematic timing effects to better than one nanosecond, except in the case of relativistic binary systems where further theoretical development is needed. The largest remaining sources of potential error are measurement error, interstellar scattering, Solar system ephemeris errors, atomic clock instability and gravitational waves.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6decb744e8b8ca0e7f95dc6ef49ee24c35533797

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

ASSESSING THE ROLE OF SPIN NOISE IN THE PRECISION TIMING OF MILLISECOND PULSARS (2010, methodology): “The TOAs are then compared to a model that accounts for the propagation of the pulse from the pulsar to the earth and refers the arrival times to the solar system barycenter (Edwards et al. 2006).”
TIMING MEASUREMENTS OF THE RELATIVISTIC BINARY PULSAR PSR B1913+16 (2010, methodology): “Similar results were obtained by fitting multiple harmonically related sinusoids to the timing noise with the routine “FITWAVES” (Hobbs et al. 2004) of program TEMPO2 (Hobbs et al. 2006; Edwards et al. 2006), instead of the multiple frequency derivatives described above.”
Pulsar timing analysis in the presence of correlated noise (2011, methodology): “An overview of the pulsar timing technique is given in Lorimer & Kramer (2005) and details are provided in Edwards et al. (2006).”
State of the Field: Extreme Precision Radial Velocities (2016, methodology): “In their publicly available code 92 A breakout session on barycentric corrections was led by Jason Eastman and Lars Buchhave. for barycentric correction,93 the authors show that their calculations match those from the TEMPO2 (Hobbs et al. 2006; Edwards et al. 2006) code at a rms level of 0.3 mm s−1.”
Precision Timing of PSR J0437–4715: An Accurate Pulsar Distance, a High Pulsar Mass, and a Limit on the Variation of Newton’s Gravitational Constant (2008, methodology): “The arrival times were analyzed using the Tempo2 pulsar timing software package (Hobbs et al. 2006; Edwards et al. 2006) and consistency with the earlier program, Tempo, was verified.”
Detection of 107 glitches in 36 southern pulsars (2012, methodology): “Timing residuals were formed using the pulsar timing software package Tempo2 (Hobbs et al. 2006; Edwards et al. 2006), with the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) planetary ephemeris DE405 (Standish 1998) to correct the local ToAs to the solar-system barycentre.”
PULSAR J0453+1559: A DOUBLE NEUTRON STAR SYSTEM WITH A LARGE MASS ASYMMETRY (2015, methodology): “…10 ftp://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/eph/planets/ioms/de421.iom.v1.pdf In order to double check the results, we used TEMPO2 (Hobbs et al. 2006 and Edwards et al. 2006) and the DDH model described by Freire & Wex (2010), which like the DD (but unlike the DDGR model) allows a theory-independent…”
Testing Relativistic Gravity with Radio Pulsars (2014, background): “sic of the radio signal. In addition, it contains a number of terms related to the Earth motion and relativistic corrections in the Solar system, like time dilation and signal propagation delays (see [27] for details). their back-reaction on the orbit (of size rand period P b), the post-Newtonian ap”
An analysis of the timing irregularities for 366 pulsars (2009, methodology): “Details are provided in Edwards et al. 2006) allows the observed pulse times of arrival (TOAs) to be compared with a model of the pulsar’s astrometric, orbital and rotational parameters.”
Barycentric Corrections at 1 cm s-1 for Precise Doppler Velocities (2014, methodology): “The pulsar community employs the TEMPO2 software (Hobbs et al. 2006; Edwards et al. 2006) which uses a fully generalrelativistic framework to predict and analyze of pulsar pulse arrival times.”
The glitch-induced identity changes of PSR J1119−6127 (2010, methodology): “Clock corrections were applied to the TOAs which were then converted to arrival times at the solar system barycentre using the DE405 model (Edwards et al. 2006; Standish 1998) using the TEMPO2 timing package (Hobbs et al. 2006).”
The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, unknown): “Software: PSRCHIVE (Hotan et al. 2004), nanopipe (Demorest 2018), Tempo (Nice et al. 2015), Tempo2 (Edwards et al. 2006; Hobbs et al. 2006), PAL2 (Ellis & van Haasteren 2017a), PTMCMCSampler (Ellis & van Haasteren 2017b), MultiNest (Feroz et al. 2009).”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, methodology): “We use the default model within TEMPO2 to account for DM variations caused by the solar wind (wind density at 1 au: 4 cm−3; Edwards et al. 2006).”