The International Pulsar Timing Array: second data release

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the International Pulsar Timing Array second data release, which includes recent pulsar timing data obtained by three regional consortia: the European Pulsar Timing Array, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. We analyse and where possible combine high-precision timing data for 65 millisecond pulsars which are regularly observed by these groups. A basic noise analysis, including the processes which are both correlated and uncorrelated in time, provides noise models and timing ephemerides for the pulsars. We find that the timing precisions of pulsars are generally improved compared to the previous data release, mainly due to the addition of new data in the combination. The main purpose of this work is to create the most up-to-date IPTA data release. These data are publicly available for searches for low-frequency gravitational waves and other pulsar science.

Modeling the Uncertainties of Solar System Ephemerides for Robust Gravitational-wave Searches with Pulsar-timing Arrays

“…Both conditions are now materializing: Juno's ongoing measurements are improving estimates of Jupiter's orbit (Folkner & Park 2018), which (we argue) is the limiting factor for GW searches; and the NANOGrav dataset is progressing toward the 15-yr span, for which (we reckon) jovian systematics decouple from GW statistics. The combined datasets assembled by the International Pulsar Timing Array (Perera et al 2019) have already passed this mark and thus may already be immune to this problem.…”

Spitzer Observations of the Predicted Eddington Flare from Blazar OJ 287

“…The International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) consortium aims to inaugurate the era of nano-Hertz (Hz) gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy during the next decade (Perera et al 2019). This is expected to augment the already established hecto-Hz GW astronomy by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration (Abbott et al 2019) and the milli-Hz GW astronomy to be established by space-based observatories in the 2030s (Baker et al 2019).…”

Gravity Tests with Radio Pulsars

“…This stable, high signal-to-noise profile is then cross-correlated with a standard profile (different for every pulsar) to obtain a TOA for a particular rotational phase of the pulsar (see e.g., [10] for details). For some of the MSPs, such an integrated pulse profile consists of several 100 thousand pulses, achieving a timing precision of well below 1 µs [11].…”

“…For a pulsar in a (nearly) circular orbit the location of periastron is not well measured and therefore neither the advance of periastron nor ∆ E can be measured in such systems. Many examples for the measurement precision achieved in state of the art pulsar timing can be found in [11].…”