Orbital Decay Anomalies (Binary Pulsars)

The Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar PSR B1913+16 and several similar systems provide the most precise tests of gravitational wave emission in general relativity through the measured decay of their orbital periods. The agreement between observed orbital decay rates and GR predictions from gravitational wave emission is currently at the 0.2 percent level — one of the most precise confirmations of GR in the strong-field regime. However, certain binary pulsar systems show small but persistent residuals between the observed orbital decay and the pure GR gravitational wave prediction after accounting for galactic acceleration corrections. These residuals, at the sub-percent level, have been attributed to imprecise knowledge of the galactic potential along the line of sight, systematic errors in pulsar timing models, or unmodeled contributions from the interstellar medium. The question of whether any residual encodes genuine new physics remains open.

Successive Collision Theory predicts small but physically meaningful contributions to binary pulsar orbital decay beyond the pure gravitational wave emission term. The hereditary time transmission mechanism modifies the local proper time rate experienced by each binary pulsar system as a function of its depth within the nested comoving frame hierarchy. The Milky Way's orbit within the Local Group, the Local Group's orbit within the Virgo supercluster, and higher-level frame orbits all contribute small but non-zero time-dilation corrections to the clock rate of any embedded pulsar. As these parent-frame orbits slowly decay through tensor mesh dissipation, the effective time-dilation factor changes secularly, introducing a tiny but coherent drift in the apparent orbital period that is indistinguishable from orbital decay in standard timing analyses. The magnitude is at the level of the current residuals — parts per thousand — and grows systematically with the dissipation rate of the parent frame hierarchy.

Additionally, the gravitational superposition from overlapping nested frames contributes to the effective gravitational potential experienced by the binary pulsar, modifying the orbital binding energy and therefore the rate at which gravitational wave emission drives the inspiral. Standard GR binary pulsar analysis uses the local Newtonian potential plus post-Newtonian corrections, but does not include the coherent superposition contribution from the surrounding frame hierarchy. This superposition term is small — at the level of tens of parts per million in the local potential — but its secular variation through mesh dissipation produces a directed, predictable contribution to the timing residual that correlates with the binary's sky position relative to the large-scale structure environment. SCT therefore predicts that timing residuals across the known binary pulsar population will show a mild angular correlation with the local matter density field — a prediction testable with the growing population of precisely timed binary pulsars from the MeerKAT and SKA arrays.