Reproducing the results for NICER observation of PSR J0030+0451

Abstract

NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) observed X-ray emission from the pulsar PSR J0030+0451 in 2018. Riley et al. reported Bayesian parameter measurements of the mass and the star's radius using pulse-profile modeling of the X-ray data. This paper reproduces their result using the open-source software X-PSI and publicly available data within expected statistical errors. We note the challenges we faced in reproducing the results and demonstrate that the analysis can be reproduced and reused in future works by changing the prior distribution for the radius and the sampler configuration. We find no significant change in the measurement of the mass and radius, demonstrating that the original result is robust to these changes. Finally, we provide a containerized working environment that facilitates third-party reproduction of the measurements of mass and radius of PSR J0030+0451 using the NICER observations.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Final version accepted for publication in Computing in Science & Engineerin