Pulsar-based map of galactic acceleration
Abigail Moran, Chiara M. F. Mingarelli, Ken Van Tilburg, Deborah C. Good
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 ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{d}}={\mathrm{0.040}}_{\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{0.020}}^{+\mathrm{0.020}}{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}{\mathrm{pc}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$. We also find evidence for unmodeled noise of unknown origin in our dataset.