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 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 ρ_d=0.040_-0.020^+0.020 M_⊙pc^-3 . We also find evidence for unmodeled noise of unknown origin in our dataset.