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Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) are rapidly advancing toward the detection of continuous gravitational waves from individual supermassive binary black holes. While it is well established that coherently utilizing the ``pulsar term" requires…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-30 Chao-Fan Wen , Yi-Qin Chen , Shi-Yi Zhao , Hao Ding , Xingjiang Zhu

Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) observations hinted towards the existence of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) in the nHz frequency band. Still, the nature of the SGWB signal cannot be confidently inferred from current data, and…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2024-04-04 Stanislav Babak , Mikel Falxa , Gabriele Franciolini , Mauro Pieroni

Current pulsar timing array (PTA) analyses do not take full advantage of pulsar distance information, thereby missing out on improved angular resolution and on a potential factor-of-two gain in detection sensitivity for individual…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-12 Anna C. Tsai , Dylan L. Jow , Ue-Li Pen

Gravitational wave (GW) searches using pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are assumed to be limited by the typical average observational cadence of $1/(2~{\rm weeks})$ for a single pulsar to GW frequencies $\lesssim 4\times 10^{-7}$ Hz. We show…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-02-10 Yan Wang , Soumya D. Mohanty , Zhoujian Cao

The highly stable spin of neutron stars can be exploited for a variety of (astro-)physical investigations. In particular arrays of pulsars with rotational periods of the order of milliseconds can be used to detect correlated signals such as…

Pulsar timing uses the highly stable pulsar spin period to investigate many astrophysical topics. In particular, pulsar timing arrays make use of a set of extremely well-timed pulsars and their time correlations as a challenging detector of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-12-16 Michele Maiorano , Francesco De Paolis , Achille A. Nucita

Pulsar timing arrays (PTA) hunt for gravitational waves (GW) by searching for the correlations that GWs induce in the time-of-arrival residuals from different pulsars. If the GW sources are of astrophysical origin, then they are located at…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-12-05 Bruce Allen , Deepali Agarwal , Joseph D. Romano , Serena Valtolina

We demonstrate how pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) can, in principle, yield a purely gravitational wave (GW) measurement of the luminosity distance and comoving distance to a supermassive black hole binary source, hence providing an estimate of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2021-09-15 Daniel J. D'Orazio , Abraham Loeb

Pulsar timing array projects are carrying out high precision observations of millisecond pulsars with the aim of detecting ultra-low frequency (~ 10^{-9} to 10^{-8} Hz) gravitational waves. We show how unambiguous detections of such waves…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-19 George Hobbs

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are Galactic-scale gravitational wave (GW) detectors consisting of precisely-timed pulsars distributed across the sky. Within the decade, PTAs are expected to detect the nanohertz GWs emitted by close-separation…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-03-15 Tingting Liu , Tyler Cohen , Casey McGrath , Paul Demorest , Sarah Vigeland

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) might detect gravitational waves (GWs) from massive black hole (MBH) binaries within this decade. The signal is expected to be an incoherent superposition of several nearly-monochromatic waves of different…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-11 Antoine Petiteau , Stanislav Babak , Alberto Sesana , Mariana de Araujo

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are ensembles of millisecond pulsars observed for years to decades. The primary goal of PTAs is to study gravitational-wave astronomy at nanohertz frequencies, with secondary goals of undertaking other…

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are limited in localizing nanohertz continuous gravitational waves (CGWs) by uncertainties in pulsar distances. We introduce a method to infer pulsar distances in two dimensions, using phase information from the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-01-23 Si-Ren Xiao , Ji-Yu Song , Yue Shao , Ling-Feng Wang , Jing-Fei Zhang , Xin Zhang

At nanohertz frequencies gravitational waves (GWs) cause variations in time-of-arrival of pulsar signals potentially measurable via precision timing observations. Here we compute very-low-frequency GW sensitivity constrained by…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-03-17 Fredrick A. Jenet , J. W. Armstrong , Massimo Tinto

One of the imminent science goals of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) is the detection of a continuous gravitational wave (CGW) emitted by an individual supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB). SMBHBs that cause CGWs with GW frequencies…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-02-18 Kathrin Grunthal , Nataliya Porayko , David J. Champion , Michael Kramer

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) have recently reported compelling evidence for the presence of a gravitational-wave background signal. Mapping the gravitational-wave background is key to understanding how it is formed, since anisotropy is a…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-01-21 Kathrin Grunthal , David J. Champion , Eric Thrane , Rowina S. Nathan , Michael Kramer , Matthew T. Miles

By monitoring the times of arrival of radio pulses from millisecond pulsars, Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) serve as unique gravitational wave (GW) laboratories in the nanohertz band. To date, the primary astrophysical sources of GWs targeted…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-24 Hippolyte Quelquejay Leclere

High-precision pulsar timing is central to a wide range of astrophysics and fundamental physics applications. When timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars in different sky positions, known as a pulsar timing array (PTA), one can search…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2018-10-09 R. N. Caballero

The steadily improving sensitivity of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) suggests that gravitational waves (GWs) from supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) systems in the nearby universe will be de- tectable sometime during the next decade.…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2014-03-07 Joseph Simon , Abigail Polin , Andrea Lommen , Ben Stappers , Lee Samuel Finn , F A Jenet , B Christy

Detection and study of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources is a major goal of current astrophysics. Ground-based laser-interferometer systems such as LIGO and VIRGO are sensitive to gravitational waves with frequencies of order…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 R. N. Manchester