high mass

There is a beautiful pulsar paper coming out in Nature tomorrow, 28th of October issue (Demorest et al 467, 1081, 2010) Green Bank Telescope measurements of PSR J1614-2230 show it to be a 3ms binary pulsar with a white dwarf companion in an orbit aligned near perfectly edge on to our line of sight. Measurements of the Shapiro Delay provide a measurement of the mass of the white dwarf, allowing the mass of the neutron star to be calculated from the known orbit of the white dwarf. The resultant inferred mass is 1.97 +/- 0.04 solar masses. click to embiggen This is a very nice result. There…