Milky Way Accelerometry via Millisecond Pulsar Timing

Abstract

The temporal stability of millisecond pulsars is remarkable, rivaling even some terrestrial atomic clocks at long timescales. Using this property, we show that millisecond pulsars distributed in the galactic neighborhood form an ensemble of accelerometers from which we can directly extract the local galactic acceleration. From pulsar spin period measurements, we demonstrate acceleration sensitivity with about 1$\sigma$ precision using 117 pulsars. We also present results from a complementary analysis using orbital periods of 13 binary pulsar systems that eliminates systematics associated with pulsar braking. This work is a first step toward dynamically measuring acceleration gradients that will eventually inform us about the dark matter density distribution in the Milky Way galaxy.