Geodetic Precession and Pulse Profile Changes Over Time of The Hulse-Taylor Binary Pulsar

Sparrow Roch, “Geodetic Precession and Pulse Profile Changes Over Time of The Hulse-Taylor Binary Pulsar”
Mentors: Joe Swiggum and David Kaplan, Physics

Pulsars are very dense, quickly rotating neutron stars that emit radiation from their magnetic poles. A pulsar’s magnetic axis and spin axis are offset, resulting in a beam of radiation that sweeps across the sky as the pulsar spins, similar to the spinning light of a lighthouse. When observed from Earth, this beam causes a regular, repeating “pulse” to be detected. Ten percent of known pulsars orbit binary companions. This work focuses on the first discovered binary pulsar: PSR B1913+16, also known as the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar. Observations of B1913+16 showed that its orbit was shrinking, which confirmed a prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and earned the discovery team, Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993. However, even while the orbit is shrinking, the pulsar is wobbling like a top. Its spin axis moves around in a big circle in a process known as “geodetic precession,” which can be measured by carefully comparing the shape of the pulse as it varies over time. PSR B1913+16 was observed regularly between 1985 and 2016 to study its changing pulse and map out its emission beam. Newer observations were taken daily for two weeks in July and August 2019 at the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Together with the older data, these new data have been analyzed to precisely measure the precession and map the emission at different radio frequencies. This allows for a greater understanding of the eventual fate of PSR B1913+16 and similar systems which will eventually merge together and emit a burst of gravitational waves (although not for a few hundred million years).

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