Constructing a pulsar timing array

Foster, Roger S.; Backer, D. C.

doi:10.1086/169195

Cited by 485 publications

(405 citation statements)

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“…Each pulsar and the Earth can be considered as free masses whose positions respond to changes in the space-time metric. A passing gravitational wave perturbs the metric and hence affects the pulse travel time and the measured arrival time at Earth [8,11,28]. If the uncertainty in the pulse arrival time is σ and the total observing time is T , then the "detector" is sensitive to a dimensionless strain (or metric perturbation) of…”

Section: Gravitational Wave Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We gain an additional factor 1/ √ N PSR from a correlation of many pulsars, where N PSR is the number of timed pulsars in the PTA. While a minimum of seven pulsars is required for calibration and cross-correlation purposes [11], ideally, a much larger N PSR should be included and a very large fraction of the sky should be covered by the PTA in order to identify large-scale spatial correlations. In summary, with the SKA sensitivity and a large number of MSPs to be discovered and timed in the PTA, the SKA will provide a huge leap in sensitivity of many orders of magnitude.…”

Section: Experimental Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strong-field tests of gravity using pulsars and black holes

Krämer

Backer

Cordes

et al. 2004

New Astronomy Reviews

193

187

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The sensitivity of the SKA enables a number of tests of theories of gravity. A Galactic Census of pulsars will discover most of the active pulsars in the Galaxy beamed toward us. In this census will almost certainly be pulsarblack hole binaries as well as pulsars orbiting the super-massive black hole in the Galactic centre. These systems are unique in their capability to probe the ultra-strong field limit of relativistic gravity. These measurements can be used to test the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture and the No-Hair theorem.The large number of millisecond pulsars discovered with the SKA will also provide a dense array of precision clocks on the sky. These clocks will act as the multiple arms of a huge gravitational wave detector, which can be used to detect and measure the stochastic cosmological gravitational wave background that is expected from a number of sources.

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Section: Gravitational Wave Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimental Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Strong-field tests of gravity using pulsars and black holes

Krämer

Backer

Cordes

et al. 2004

New Astronomy Reviews

193

187

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“…Our first results are described in Foster & Backer (1990). The observations are conducted every two months at 800 and 1400 MHz.…”

Section: Pulsar Timing Array Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timing of Millisecond Pulsars

Backer

1996

Symp. - Int. Astron. Union

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Abstract.Arrival times of some millisecond pulsars can be measured with submicrosecond precision. This allows unprecedented measurements of the rotation of these stars, astrometric parameters including proper motion and parallax, motion in binary and complex dynamical systems, perturbations resulting from propagation through small scale turbulence in the interstellar plasma and other effects. In addition to the independent parameters which are required to model each pulsar, there is a set of global parameters that affect the array of pulsars in a correlated manner. These parameters involve the international atomic time scale, the ephemeris of the Earth's orbit and the gravitational wave background and have monopole, dipole and quadrupole and higher order angular signatures, respectively.

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“…In the nanohertz frequency range (1-100 nHz), high-precision timing observations of millisecond pulsars (pulsar timing arrays -PTAs) provide a unique means of detecting GWs. With the concept proposed decades ago (Sazhin 1978;Detweiler 1979;Hellings & Downs 1983;Foster & Backer 1990), there are now three major PTA projects around the globe, namely, the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA; Hobbs 2013), the European Pulsar Timing Array (Kramer & Champion 2013), and NANOGrav (McLaughlin 2013). While these PTAs have individually collected high-quality data spanning 5 yrs for ∼20 pulsars and produced some astrophysically interesting results (e.g., Shannon et al 2013), they have also been combined to form the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA; Hobbs et al 2010;) aiming at significantly enhanced sensitivities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection and localization of single-source gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays

Zhu¹,

Wen²,

Hobbs³

et al. 2015

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) can be used to search for very low frequency (10 −9 -10 −7 Hz) gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper we present a general method for the detection and localization of single-source GWs using PTAs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new method for three types of signals: monochromatic waves as expected from individual supermassive binary black holes in circular orbits, GWs from eccentric binaries and GW bursts. We also test its implementation in realistic data sets that include effects such as uneven sampling and heterogeneous data spans and measurement precision. It is shown that our method, which works in the frequency domain, performs as well as published time-domain methods. In particular, we find it equivalent to the F e -statistic for monochromatic waves. We also discuss the construction of null streams -data streams that have null response to GWs, and the prospect of using null streams as a consistency check in the case of detected GW signals. Finally, we present sensitivities to individual supermassive binary black holes in eccentric orbits. We find that a monochromatic search that is designed for circular binaries can efficiently detect eccentric binaries with both high and low eccentricities, while a harmonic summing technique provides greater sensitivities only for binaries with moderate eccentricities.

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Constructing a pulsar timing array

Cited by 485 publications

References 0 publications

Strong-field tests of gravity using pulsars and black holes

Strong-field tests of gravity using pulsars and black holes

Timing of Millisecond Pulsars

Detection and localization of single-source gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays

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