NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) observed X-ray emission from the pulsar PSR J0030+0451 in 2018. Riley \textit{et al.} reported Bayesian parameter measurements of the mass and the radius of the star using pulse-profile modeling of the X-ray data. In this paper, we reproduce their result using the open-source software \textit{X-PSI} and the publicly available data. We reproduce the main result within the expected statistical error. We note the challenges we faced in reproducing the results. We demonstrate that not only that the analysis can be reproduced, it can also be reused in future works by changing the prior distribution for the radius, and by changing the sampler configuration. We find no significant change in the measurement of the mass and radius, demonstrating that the original result is robust to these changes. Finally, we provide a containerized working environment that facilitates third-party reproduction of the measurements of mass and radius of PSR J0030+0451 using the NICER observations.
翻译:NASA的中子星内部成分探测器(NICER)在2018年观测到脉冲星PSR J0030+0451的X射线发射。Riley等人使用脉冲轮廓建模X射线数据报告了质量和半径的贝叶斯参数测量结果。在本文中,我们使用开源软件X-PSI和公开可用的数据重新复现了他们的结果。我们在预期的统计误差范围内复现了主要结果。我们注意到在复现结果时遇到的挑战。我们证明不仅可以重复分析,而且可以通过更改半径的先验分布和更改采样器配置来将其用于未来的研究。我们发现质量和半径的测量结果没有显著变化,证明原始结果对这些变化是稳健的。最后,我们提供一个容器化的工作环境,以利于第三方使用NICER观测PSR J0030+0451的测量结果。