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 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 $\rho_\mathrm{d} = 0.040_{-0.020}^{+0.020} \ \mathrm{M_\odot}\mathrm{pc}^{-3}$. We also find evidence for unmodeled noise of unknown origin in our data set.