Stringent Tests of Gravity with Highly Relativistic Binary Pulsars in the Era of LISA and SKA
Abstract
At present, 19 double neutron star (DNS) systems are detected by radio timing and two merging DNS systems are detected by kilohertz gravitational waves. Because of selection effects, none of them has an orbital period Pb in the range of a few tens of minutes. In this paper we consider a multimessenger strategy proposed by Kyutoku et al., jointly using the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna and the Square Kilometre Array to detect and study Galactic pulsar-neutron star (PSR-NS) systems with Pb ~ 10-100 minutes. We assume that we will detect PSR-NS systems by this strategy. We use standard pulsar-timing software to simulate times of arrival of pulse signals from these binary pulsars. We obtain the precision of timing parameters of short-orbital-period PSR-NS systems with orbital period Pb ∈ (8, 120) minutes. We use the simulated uncertainty of the orbital decay, ${\dot{P}}_{b}$ , to predict future tests for a variety of alternative theories of gravity. We show quantitatively that highly relativistic PSR-NS systems will significantly improve the constraint on parameters of specific gravity theories in the strong field regime. We also investigate the orbital periastron advance caused by the Lense-Thirring effect in a PSR-NS system with Pb = 8 minutes, and show that the Lense-Thirring effect will be detectable to a good precision.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- November 2021
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ac1d48
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2107.05812
- Bibcode:
- 2021ApJ...921..114M
- Keywords:
-
- Gravitation;
- Binary pulsars;
- Non-standard theories of gravity;
- Pulsars;
- Pulsar timing method;
- 661;
- 153;
- 1118;
- 1306;
- 1305;
- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
- E-Print:
- 17 pages, 4 figures