Gravitational Wave Astronomy Using Pulsars: Massive Black Hole Mergers & the Early Universe

By P. Demorest, J. Lazio, A. Lommen, for the Virgo Collaboration. 2009

383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravitational waves (GWs) are fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Using a collection of millisecond pulsars as high-precision clocks, the nanohertz band of this radiation is likely to be directly detected within the next decade. Nanohertz-frequency GWs are expected to be emitted by mergers of massive black hole binary systems, and potentially also by cosmic strings or superstrings formed in the early Universe. Direct detection of GWs will open a new window to the Universe, and provide astrophysical information inaccessible via electromagnetic observations. In this paper, we describe the potential sources of low-frequency GWs and the current status and key advances needed for the detection and exploitation of GWs through pulsar timing.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40562ec15ab8f848d33ad2c4c69c84ec4d229b5d

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Citations in the corpus

The NANOGrav 11 Year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints on the Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background (2018, methodology): “The increasing sensitivity of PTAs is apparent in the evertightening upper limits (van Haasteren et al. 2011; Demorest et al. 2013; Shannon et al. 2013; Lentati et al. 2015; Shannon et al. 2015; Arzoumanian et al. 2016) on the stochastic GWB from the unresolved superposition of SMBHB signals out to…”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries (2015, methodology): “…al. 2009; Lentati et al. 2013; Chamberlin et al. 2014) and applied to the EPTA, PPTA, and NANOGrav datasets to get limits on the amplitude of a putative isotropic GWB (Jenet et al. 2006; Yardley et al. 2011; van Haasteren et al. 2011; Demorest et al. 2013; Shannon et al. 2013; Lentati et al. 2015).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, methodology): “There are three exceptions to this: the Demorest et al. (2013) NANOGrav data are timed without frequency averaging, so each frequency-channel provides a single ToA; the Zhu et al. (2015) data were partially averaged in time (up to 30 min) and frequency (final frequency resolution dependent on the…”
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “…et al. 2020, henceforth NG12gwb) for the 12.5-year data set collected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves (NANOGrav, McLaughlin 2013; Ransom et al. 2019), and then confirmed (Goncharov et al. 2021a; Chen et al. 2021) by the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA,…”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, methodology): “We will also be applying the Bayesian methods developed elsewhere (e.g., van Haasteren et al., 2011; Demorest et al., 2013; Lentati et al., 2014) to our data sets.”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, background): “Zhu et al. (2015) have analysed 21 years of timing data from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) for this pulsar to conduct tests of theories of gravity.”
The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, methodology): “For newly added sources, template profiles were generated following the procedure described by Demorest et al. (2013) and NG9.”