Binary Pulsar Distances and Velocities from Gaia Data Release 2

Understand

The second data release from the Gaia mission (Gaia DR2) includes, among its billion entries, as- trometric parameters for binary companions to a number of known pulsars, including white dwarf companions to millisecond pulsars and the non-degenerate components of so-called "black widow" and "redback" systems.

• We find 22 such counterparts in DR2, of which 12 have statistically sig- nificant measurements of parallax.
• These DR2 optical proper motions and parallaxes provide new measurements of the distances and transverse velocities of the associated pulsars.
• For the most part, the results agree with existing radio interferometric and pulsar timing-based astrometry, as well as other distance estimates based on photometry or associations, and for some pulsars they provide the best known distance and velocity estimates.