The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project

By R. Manchester, G. Hobbs, M. Bailes, W. Coles, Willem van Straten, M. Keith, R. Shannon, N. D. Ramesh Bhat, A. Brown, S. Burke-Spolaor and 58 more. Publications Astronomical Society of Australia, 2006

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract A ‘pulsar timing array’ (PTA), in which observations of a large sample of pulsars spread across the celestial sphere are combined, allows investigation of ‘global’ phenomena such as a background of gravitational waves or instabilities in atomic timescales that produce correlated timing residuals in the pulsars of the array. The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) is an implementation of the PTA concept based on observations with the Parkes 64-m radio telescope. A sample of 20 ms pulsars is being observed at three radio-frequency bands, 50 cm (~700 MHz), 20 cm (~1400 MHz), and 10 cm (~3100 MHz), with observations at intervals of two to three weeks. Regular observations commenced in early 2005. This paper describes the systems used for the PPTA observations and data processing, including calibration and timing analysis. The strategy behind the choice of pulsars, observing parameters, and analysis methods is discussed. Results are presented for PPTA data in the three bands taken between 2005 March and 2011 March. For 10 of the 20 pulsars, rms timing residuals are less than 1 μs for the best band after fitting for pulse frequency and its first time derivative. Significant ‘red’ timing noise is detected in about half of the sample. We discuss the implications of these results on future projects including the International Pulsar Timing Array and a PTA based on the Square Kilometre Array. We also present an ‘extended PPTA’ data set that combines PPTA data with earlier Parkes timing data for these pulsars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e7a1ffaacf57cf6bc7ee860e5abdcd8a322e19b

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Citations in the corpus

Searching for the Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I (2023, background): “At present, six major regional PTAs exist: Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA, Manchester 2008; Manchester et al. 2013; Goncharov et al. 2022), European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA, Kramer & Champion 2013; Chalumeau et al. 2022), North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav,…”
Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments (2016, background): “There are currently three ongoing PTA groups, the North-American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational-waves (NANOGrav, The NANOGrav Collaboration et al. 2015), the European PTA (EPTA, Desvignes et al. 2016), and the Parkes PTA (PPTA, Manchester et al. 2013).”
Spectral properties of 441 radio pulsars (2017, background): “Pulsars that were extensively studied as part of other Parkes projects such as P456 - Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (Manchester et al. 2013) or P574 - Pulsar timing with the Parkes Radio Telescope for the Fermi mission (Weltevrede et al. 2010) were not considered, as they already had sufficient data.”
A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates (2016, background): “…be detectable by Pulsar Timing Arrays (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves; Jenet et al. 2009, Parkes Pulsar Timing Array; Manchester 2008, European Pulsar Timing Array; Janssen et al. 2008) or future space-based interferometers, such as eLISA (Amaro-Seoane et al. 2013).”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, methodology): “For each parallax measurement, we calculate the Lutz–Kelker (Lutz & Kelker 1973) corrected parallax value and the corresponding corrected distance using the method of Verbiest et al. (2012) and with the mean flux of each pulsar given in Manchester et al. (2013).”
Pulsar timing signal from ultralight scalar dark matter (2013, methodology): “The main effects that contribute to the variation of signal arrival times are the motion of the laboratory frame with respect to the Solar System barycentre, the peculiar motion of the pulsar, the dispersion by the interstellar medium, and the intrinsic variation of the pulsar period (cf. [11]).”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries (2015, methodology): “…applied the frequentist and Bayesian methods for evolving and nonevolving signals described in Ellis et al. (2012) to the NANOGrav 5-year dataset (Demorest et al. 2013), whereas Zhu et al. (2014) applied a frequentist method to the PPTA data release (DR1) presented in Manchester et al. (2013).”
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, result): “…McLaughlin 2013; Ransom et al. 2019), and then confirmed (Goncharov et al. 2021a; Chen et al. 2021) by the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA, Manchester et al. 2013) and the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA, Desvignes et al. 2016), following many years of null results and steadily…”
Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays (2015, background): “There are three independent PTA consortia: the European PTA (EPTA, Ferdman et al. 2010), the Parkes PTA (PPTA, Manchester et al. 2013), and NANOGrav (Jenet et al. 2009).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, methodology): “Specifically, the Australian Parkes PTA (PPTA; Manchester et al. 2013) is centred on the Parkes radio telescope (PKS); the European PTA (EPTA; Desvignes et al. 2016) uses the five4 major European centimetre-wavelength telescopes (see Table 1 for details); and the North-American Nanohertz…”