Max Plank Institute for Radio Astronomy | 23 Aug 2010
Measuring the mass of solar-system planets using pulsar timing - DJ Champion et alPulsar timing observations allow a new way to estimate planet masses
An international research team led by David Champion, now at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, with researchers from Australia, Germany, the U.S., UK and Canada has come up with a new way to weigh the planets in our Solar System, using radio signals from pulsars. Data from a set of four pulsars have been used to weigh Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with their moons and rings.
The new measurement technique is sensitive to just 0.003% of the mass of the Earth, and one ten-millionth of Jupiter's mass (corresponding to a mass difference of two hundred thousand million million tonnes). The results are described in an article for the Astrophysical Journal, which is publicly accessible via preprint-server.
Until now, astronomers have weighed planets by measuring the orbits of their moons or of spacecraft flying past them. That's because mass creates gravity, and a planet's gravitational pull determines the orbit of anything that goes around it - both the size of the orbit and how long it takes to complete. The new method is based on corrections astronomers make to signals from pulsars, small spinning stars that deliver regular "blips" of radio waves. Measurements of planet masses made this new way could feed into data needed for future space missions.
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The Earth is travelling around the Sun, and this movement affects exactly when pulsar signals arrive here. To remove this effect, astronomers calculate when the pulses would have arrived at the Solar System's centre of mass, or barycentre, the rotation centre for all the planets. Because the arrangement of the planets around the Sun changes with time, the barycentre moves around too (relative to the sun).
To work out its position, astronomers use both a table with the positions of the planets in the sky (called an ephemeris), and the values for their masses that have already been measured. If these figures are slightly wrong, and the position of the barycentre is slightly wrong, then a regular, repeating pattern of timing errors appears in the pulsar data.
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The new measurement technique is sensitive to a mass difference of two hundred thousand million million tonnes-just 0.003% of the mass of the Earth, and one ten-millionth of Jupiter's mass. In the short term, spacecraft will continue to make the most accurate measurements for individual planets, but the pulsar technique will be the best for planets not being visited by spacecraft, and for measuring the combined masses of planets and their moons. Repeating the measurements would improve the values even more. If astronomers observed a set of 20 pulsars over seven years they'd weigh Jupiter more accurately than spacecraft have. Doing the same for Saturn would take 13 years.
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 720(2) L201 (23 Aug 2010) DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/720/2/L201 (pdf)