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Pulsars are very stable clocks in space which have many applications to problems in physics and astrophysics. Observations of double-neutron-star binary systems have given the first observational evidence for the existence of gravitational…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2010-04-22 R. N. Manchester

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are used to search for long-wavelength gravitational waves (GWs) by monitoring a set of spin-stable millisecond pulsars. Most theoretical analyses assume that the relevant GW sources are much more distant from…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-01-03 Dustin R. Madison , David F. Chernoff , James M. Cordes

We describe system verification tests and early science results from the pulsar processor (PTUSE) developed for the newly-commissioned 64-dish SARAO MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT is a high-gain (~2.8 K/Jy) low-system…

We have begun an exciting era for gravitational wave detection, as several world-leading experiments are breaching the threshold of anticipated signal strengths. Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are pan-Galactic gravitational wave detectors that…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2015-11-26 Sarah Burke-Spolaor

Pulsar timing is a technique that uses the highly stable spin periods of neutron stars to investigate a wide range of topics in physics and astrophysics. Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) use sets of extremely well-timed pulsars as a Galaxy-scale…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2021-10-05 J. P. W. Verbiest , S. Oslowski , S. Burke-Spolaor

Dense, continuous pulsar timing observations over a 24-hr period provide a method for probing intermediate gravitational wave (GW) frequencies from 10 microhertz to 20 millihertz. The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA), the North American…

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) provide a way to detect gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies. In this band, the most likely signals are stochastic, with a power spectrum that rises steeply at lower frequencies. Indeed, the observation…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-06-02 Bruce Allen , Sanjeev Dhurandhar , Yashwant Gupta , Maura McLaughlin , Priyamvada Natarajan , Ryan M. Shannon , Eric Thrane , Alberto Vecchio

Long-term precise timing of Galactic millisecond pulsars holds great promise for measuring the long-period (months-to-years) astrophysical gravitational waves. Several gravitational-wave observational programs, called Pulsar Timing Arrays…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Rutger van Haasteren , Yuri Levin , Patrick McDonald , Tingting Lu

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are designed to detect nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves (GWs). Since GWs are anticipated from cosmic strings, PTAs offer a viable approach to testing their existence. We present the results of the first…

Observing and timing a group of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) with high rotational stability enables the direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs). The GW signals can be identified from the spatial correlations encoded in the…

The turbulent nature of the ionised interstellar medium (IISM) causes dispersion measure (DM) and scattering variations in pulsar timing measurements. To improve precision of gravitational wave measurements, pulsar timing array (PTA)…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-11-06 A. D. Kulkarni , R. M. Shannon , D. J. Reardon , M. T. Miles

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will become one of the world-leading telescopes for pulsar timing array (PTA) research. The primary goals for PTAs are to detect (and subsequently study) ultra-low-frequency…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-07-03 G. Hobbs , S. Dai , R. N. Manchester , R. M. Shannon , M. Kerr , K. J. Lee , R. Xu

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) can detect disturbances in the fabric of spacetime on a galactic scale by monitoring the arrival time of pulses from millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Recent advancements have enabled the use of $\gamma$-ray radiation…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-03-14 Hoang Nhan Luu , Tao Liu , Jing Ren , Tom Broadhurst , Ruizhi Yang , Jie-Shuang Wang , Zhen Xie

We present the results of the search for an isotropic stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) at nanohertz frequencies using the second data release of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) for 25 millisecond pulsars and a…

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

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) seek to detect a nano-Hz stochastic gravitational-wave background (GWB) by searching for the characteristic Hellings and Downs angular pattern of timing residual correlations. So far, the evidence remains below…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-09-09 Rutger van Haasteren , Bruce Allen , Joseph D. Romano

The noise in millisecond pulsar (MSP) timing data can include contributions from observing instruments, the interstellar medium, the solar wind, solar system ephemeris errors, and the pulsars themselves. The noise environment must be…

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are searching for nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) through cross-correlation of pulse arrival times from a set of radio pulsars. PTAs have relied upon a frequency-shift formula of the pulse, where…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-07-03 Ryousuke Kubo , Kakeru Yamahira , Hideki Asada

High-precision pulsar timing observations are limited in their accuracy by the jitter noise that appears in the arrival time of pulses. Therefore, it is important to systematically characterise the amplitude of the jitter noise and its…

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