English

Constraints on the velocity of gravitational waves from NANOGrav 15-year data set

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2025-03-28 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

General relativity predicts that gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light. Although ground-based gravitational-wave detectors have successfully constrained the velocity of gravitational waves in the high-frequency range, extending this constraint to the lower frequency range remains a challenge. In this work, we utilize the deviations in the overlap reduction function for a gravitational-wave background within pulsar timing arrays to investigate the velocity of gravitational waves in the nanohertz frequency band. By analyzing the NANOGrav 15-year data set, we obtain a well-constrained lower bound for the velocity of gravitational waves that v0.87cv \gtrsim 0.87\,c, where cc is the speed of light.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.08366,
  title  = {Constraints on the velocity of gravitational waves from NANOGrav 15-year data set},
  author = {Yan-Chen Bi and Yu-Mei Wu and Zu-Cheng Chen and Qing-Guo Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08366},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table