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Pulsar timing experiments are reaching sufficient sensitivity to detect a postulated stochastic gravitational wave background generated by merging supermassive black hole systems in the cores of galaxies. We describe the techniques behind…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-06-23 G. Hobbs

State-of-the-art searches for gravitational waves (GWs) in pulsar timing array (PTA) datasets model the signal as an isotropic, Gaussian and stationary process described by a power-law. In practice, none of these properties are expected to…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-03-25 Serena Valtolina , Golam Shaifullah , Anuradha Samajdar , Alberto Sesana

Gravitational waves are a radically new way to peer into the darkest depths of the cosmos. Pulsars can be used to make direct detections of gravitational waves through precision timing. When a gravitational wave passes between a pulsar and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-05-28 Stephen R. Taylor

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

The direct detection of Gravitational Waves (GWs) by Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) is very likely within the next decade. While the stochastic GW background is a promising candidate for detection it is also possible that single resolvable…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-15 Justin Ellis

The recent evidence of a stochastic background of gravitational waves in the nHz band by pulsar-timing array (PTA) experiments has shed new light on the formation and evolution of massive black hole binaries with masses $\sim 10^8$--$10^9…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-11-27 Enrico Barausse , Kallol Dey , Marco Crisostomi , Akshay Panayada , Sylvain Marsat , Soumen Basak

Direct detection of low-frequency gravitational waves ($10^{-9} - 10^{-8}$ Hz) is the main goal of pulsar timing array (PTA) projects. One of the main targets for the PTAs is to measure the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWB)…

Strong evidence for an isotropic, Gaussian gravitational wave background (GWB) has been found by multiple pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). The GWB is expected to be sourced by a finite population of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs)…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-05-21 William G. Lamb , Jeremy M. Wachter , Andrea Mitridate , Shashwat C. Sardesai , Bence Bécsy , Emily L. Hagen , Stephen R. Taylor , Luke Zoltan Kelley

In the summer of 2023, the pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) announced a compelling evidence for the existence of a nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). Despite this breakthrough, however, several critical questions remain…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-04-16 Reginald Christian Bernardo , Kin-Wang Ng

We consider the inverse problem in pulsar timing array (PTA) analysis, investigating what astrophysical information about the underlying massive black hole binary (MBHB) population can be recovered from the detection of a stochastic…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-07-12 Siyuan Chen , Hannah Middleton , Alberto Sesana , Walter Del Pozzo , Alberto Vecchio

One of the most promising targets for Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) is identifying an individual supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) out of the population of binaries theorized to produce a gravitational wave background (GWB). In this…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-04-21 Levi Schult , Polina Petrov , Stephen R. Taylor , Nihan Pol , Nima Laal , Maria Charisi , Chung-Pei Ma

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

Supermassive black hole binaries are the strongest gravitational wave sources in the universe. The systems most likely to be observed with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) will have particularly high masses ($\gtrsim 10^9 M_\odot$), long periods…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2014-11-17 Jeremy D. Schnittman

A new detection method for ultra-low frequency gravitational waves (GWs) with a frequency much lower than the observational range of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) was suggested in Yonemaru et al. (2016). In the PTA analysis, ultra-low…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2018-05-02 Naoyuki Yonemaru , Hiroki Kumamoto , Keitaro Takahashi , Sachiko Kuroyanagi

Highly energetic astrophysical phenomena like supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) mergers are predicted to emit prodigious amounts of gravitational waves (GWs). An anticipated component of the gravitational waveform known as "memory" is…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-19 D. R. Madison , J. M. Cordes , S. Chatterjee

The observation of massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) is one of the goals of gravitational wave astronomy in the coming years. Massive (>10^8 solar masses) and low-redshift (< 1.5) sources are expected to…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2010-05-19 Alberto Sesana , Alberto Vecchio

Gravitational Waves (GW) have now been detected from stellar-mass black hole binaries, and the first observations of GW from Massive Black Hole (MBH) Binaries are expected within the next decade. Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTA), which can…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-10-06 Luke Zoltan Kelley , Laura Blecha , Lars Hernquist

Gravitational wave (GW) searches using pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are commonly assumed to be limited to a GW frequency of $\lesssim 4\times 10^{-7}$Hz given by the Nyquist rate associated with the average observational cadence of $2$ weeks…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-04-01 Xuan Tao , Yan Wang , Soumya D. Mohanty

Pulsar timing arrays (PTA) are a promising probe to the cosmologically novel nanohertz gravitational wave (GW) regime through the stochastic GW background. In this work, we consider subluminal GW modes as a possible source of correlations…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2023-05-26 Reginald Christian Bernardo , Kin-Wang Ng

We present a comprehensive framework for predicting the detection prospects of supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) by future gravitational wave (GW) observatories, examining both space-borne detectors (LISA, Taiji, TianQin) and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-02-09 Katsunori Kusakabe , Yoshiyuki Inoue , Daisuke Toyouchi , Keitaro Takahashi