Determination of the orbital parameters of binary pulsars

Abstract

We present a simple method for determination of the orbital parameters of binary pulsars, using data on the pulsar period at multiple observing epochs. This method uses the circular nature of the velocity space orbit of Keplerian motion and produces preliminary values based on two one-dimensional searches. Preliminary orbital parameter values are then refined using a computationally efficient linear least-squares fit. This method works for random and sparse sampling of the binary orbit. We demonstrate the technique on (i) the highly eccentric binary pulsar PSR J0514-4002 (the first known pulsar in the globular cluster NGC 1851) and (ii) 47 Tuc T, a binary pulsar with a nearly circular orbit. © 2008 RAS.