A Pulsar-Based Map of Galactic Acceleration

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 26 binary pulsars. We validate these data with a local acceleration model, and compare our results to those extracted from indirect methods. We find evidence for an acceleration gradient in agreement with these values, with our results indicating a local disk density of $\rho_\mathrm{d} = 0.064_{-0.033}^{+0.025} \ \mathrm{M_\odot}\mathrm{pc}^{-3}$. We also find evidence for unmodeled noise of unknown origin in our data set.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure