The Discovery of the Most Accelerated Binary Pulsar

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of PSR J1757-1854, the most accelerated binary pulsar known, providing a new natural laboratory for testing gravity theories.

Contribution

It introduces a new survey strategy and reports the discovery of the highly accelerated binary pulsar PSR J1757-1854, expanding the relativistic parameter space explored by pulsar binaries.

Findings

Discovery of PSR J1757-1854, the most accelerated binary pulsar.

The system has a 21.5-ms pulsar in a 4.4-hour orbit with high eccentricity.

Provides a new natural laboratory for testing theories of gravity.

Abstract

Pulsars in relativistic binary systems have emerged as fantastic natural laboratories for testing theories of gravity, the most prominent example being the double pulsar, PSR J0737$-$3039. The HTRU-South Low Latitude pulsar survey represents one of the most sensitive blind pulsar surveys taken of the southern Galactic plane to date, and its primary aim has been the discovery of new relativistic binary pulsars. Here we present our binary pulsar searching strategy and report on the survey's flagship discovery, PSR J1757$-$1854. A 21.5-ms pulsar in a relativistic binary with an orbital period of 4.4 hours and an eccentricity of 0.61, this double neutron star (DNS) system is the most accelerated pulsar binary known, and probes a relativistic parameter space not yet explored by previous pulsar binaries.