Measuring Pulsar Distances from Chirping Orbital Periods

TL;DR

This paper uses the orbital period changes of millisecond pulsars to estimate their distances, improving accuracy for some and analyzing the impact of galactic models on these measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a method to infer pulsar distances from orbital chirp data, incorporating galactic acceleration models to evaluate uncertainties.

Findings

Distances for 4 MSPs are more precise than previous measurements.

Galactic acceleration models significantly affect distance estimates for some MSPs.

Orbital chirp provides a valuable tool for pulsar distance measurement.

Abstract

The observed orbital period time derivative (or orbital "chirp") of a millisecond binary pulsar (MSP) encodes information about both the intrinsic properties of the binary system and its environment. Orbital chirp has contributions from intrinsic energy loss due to gravitational wave emission, kinematic effects due to motion in the plane of the sky, and dynamical effects due to galactic acceleration, with the latter two contributions depending on the MSP distance. We use orbital chirp data to infer distances to 21 MSPs; and for four of which we obtain smaller uncertainties than those reported in previous distance measurements. We incorporate multiple realistic galactic acceleration models to assess the sensitivity of the inferred distances to the choice of galactic gravitational potential, finding a significant dependence for four MSPs.