A Pulsar-Based Map of Galactic Acceleration

TL;DR

This paper presents the first direct measurements of line-of-sight accelerations for 29 binary pulsars, validating the data and providing insights into the Galactic potential and local disk density.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of pulsar accelerations and compares it with models, revealing the Galactic acceleration gradient and local disk density.

Findings

Evidence for an acceleration gradient consistent with models

Estimated local disk density of approximately 0.040 M_sun/pc^3

Detection of unmodeled noise in the data

Abstract

Binary pulsars can be used to probe Galactic potential gradients through calculating their line-of-sight accelerations. We present the first data release of direct line-of-sight acceleration measurements for 29 binary pulsars. We validate these data with a local acceleration model, and compare our results to those from earlier works. We find evidence for an acceleration gradient in agreement with these values, with our results indicating a local disk density of $\rho_\mathrm{d} = 0.040_{-0.020}^{+0.020} \ \mathrm{M_\odot}\mathrm{pc}^{-3}$. We also find evidence for unmodeled noise of unknown origin in our data set.