Tests of gravity theories with pulsar timing

Understand

Over the last few years, a set of new results from pulsar timing has introduced much tighter constraints on violations of the strong equivalence principle (SEP), either via a direct verification of the universality of free fall for a pulsar in a triple star system, or from tests of the nature of gravitational waves, in particular a search for dipolar gravitational wave emission in a variety of binary pulsars with different masses.

• No deviations from the SEP have been detected in our experiments.
• These results introduce some of the most stringent constraints on several classes of alternative theories of gravity and complement recent results from the ground-based gravitational wave detectors.