Effect of background constraints on mass inference without radio priors

Determine whether imposing lower and upper NICER background constraints (including 3C50 instrument background and attenuated AGN contributions) in pulse profile modeling of PSR J0437−4715 alters the recovered mass posterior when the informative radio-derived mass prior is removed, specifically whether such constraints change the strong disfavouring of the known mass observed in unconstrained analyses.

Background

Mass priors from radio timing are highly informative for NICER pulse profile modeling. In prior work on PSR J0740+6620, removing the mass prior yielded an unconstrained mass posterior, while for PSR J0437−4715 removing the prior produced a mass posterior that strongly disfavors the known mass, at least when background constraints are not applied.

Testing whether adding background constraints would alter this outcome is computationally expensive and was not completed in this paper, leaving the question explicitly unresolved.