Research Project day: Researching Relativistic Pulsar Binaries

MeerKAT pulsar timing workshop Research Project day: Researching Relativistic Pulsar Binaries

The lectures presented here formed part of a separate research project day following the initial two-day MeerKAT pulsar timing workshop. In these sets of lectures Daniel Reardon discusses the process of conducting pulsar timing research when analysing relativistic pulsar binary systems.

The lectures introduce good research practices, including how to do bookkeeping while conducting timing research and how to search for and engage with background literature of the relativistic binary system to be analysed. Thereafter it switches to using tempo2 to improve the timing model, and in particular also discusses how to use temponest to obtain the best noise model descriptions for the binary system. It describes how to use tempo2 and temponest in iteration to ultimately obtain the best timing model which maximises the Bayesian evidence considered.

While the research project data are (for now) not made available to the public, the lectures remain a valuable resource. They are recorded in three parts (Part 1 to Part 3).

Part 1