Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2018 Oct 22
Pulsar observations enable mass estimates for Ceres and other solar system objects
A team of scientists from the `International Pulsar Timing Array’ consortium, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has used pulsar timing data to measure the masses of the dwarf-planet Ceres and other asteroids. The result for the mass of Ceres is 1.3% of the mass of the Earth’s moon. The team has also measured the masses of the major planets of the solar system with much improved precision than a past study and demonstrated how pulsar-timing data can be used to explore unknown massive objects orbiting the Sun. ...
Solar system bodies can be weighed based on corrections astronomers make to signals from pulsars, small spinning stars that emit regular ‘flashes’ of radio waves. This technique, which was first published in 2010 by a team of researchers led by David Champion, now at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), relies on the precise timing of signals from an array of millisecond pulsars. Astronomers observe the beamed radiation millisecond pulsars emit as ‘flashing’, periodical signals, much like one would observe from a lighthouse. Unlike lighthouses, however, these celestial objects rotate with tremendous speeds, with periods down to a few milliseconds, and are the most stable rotators known in the Universe. The largest radio telescopes are needed to resolving these weak signals. ...
The motion of the Earth around the Sun makes it complicated to directly use the recorded pulse times-of-arrival at the telescope. Astronomers circumvent this problem by recalculating the times-of-arrival to a common reference frame, namely the centre of mass of the entire solar system, the so-called “the solar-system barycentre”. ...
Studying the Solar System with the International Pulsar Timing Array ~ R.N. Caballero et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 481(4):5501 (Dec 2018) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2632
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1809.10744 > 27 Sep 2018