Hulse-Taylor timing experiment
ID: hulse-taylor-timing-experiment
The surprise was a pulsar whose apparent period would not stay fixed. Russell Alan Hulse's Arecibo search used a multichannel receiver, pulsar dedispersion and computer searches over period and pulse width. Follow-up at higher time resolution retained the changing period, excluding inadequate sampling as its explanation. The observed variation exceeded the expected terrestrial Doppler shift; a predicted reversal from decreasing to increasing period appeared on 16 September 1974.[ref]
The Discovery of the Binary Pulsar by Russell Alan Hulse. The Discovery of the Binary Pulsar, lecture delivered 8 December 1993, pp. 53–58 and 62–65, Figures 3–4 and 8–10
The 1975 analysis fitted an eccentric Kepler orbit to Doppler shifts inferred from about 200 five-minute period measurements over ten days. That discovery fit was not yet the later precision arrival-time experiment.[ref]
Discovery of a Pulsar in a Binary System by Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.. L51–L52, section II, Tables 1–2, Figure 1 and equations 1–4
An orbit explains both signs of the apparent period change without requiring the stellar rotation to alternate between speeding up and slowing down. New to topics? Read the docs here!