Relativistic effects in a mildly recycled pulsar binary: PSR J1952+2630

Understand

We report the results of timing observations of PSR J1952+2630, a 20.7 ms pulsar in orbit with a massive white dwarf companion.

• With the increased timing baseline, we obtain improved estimates for astrometric, spin, and binary parameters for this system.
• We get an improvement of an order of magnitude on the proper motion, and, for the first time, we detect three post-Keplerian parameters in this system: the advance of periastron, the orbital decay, and the Shapiro delay.
• We constrain the pulsar mass to 1.20$^{+0.28}_{-0.29}\rm M_{\odot}$ and the mass of its companion to 0.97$^{+0.16}_{-0.13}\rm M_{\odot}$.