Gravitational wave astronomy with the SKA

By G. Janssen, G. Hobbs, Maura Mclaughlin, Cees G. Bassa, A. Deller, M. Kramer, Ke-Jia Lee, C. Mingarelli, P. Rosado, S. Sanidas and 5 more. 2014

459 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On a time scale of years to decades, gravitational wave (GW) astronomy will become a reality. Low frequency (∼10 −9 Hz) GWs are detectable through long-term timing observations of the most stable pulsars. Radio observatories worldwide are currently carrying out observing programmes to detect GWs, with data sets being shared through the International Pulsar Timing Array project. One of the most likely sources of low frequency GWs are supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), detectable as a background due to a large number of binaries, or as continuous or burst emission from individual sources. No GW signal has yet been detected, but stringent constraints are already being placed on galaxy evolution models. The SKA will bring this research to fruition. In this chapter, we describe how timing observations using SKA1 will contribute to detecting GWs, or can confirm a detection if a first signal already has bee n identified when SKA1 commences observations. We describe how SKA observations will identify the source(s) of a GW signal, search for anisotropies in the background, improve models of galaxy evolution, test theories of gravity, and characterise the early inspiral phase o f a SMBHB system. We describe the impact of the large number of millisecond pulsars to be discovered by the SKA; and the observing cadence, observation durations, and instrumentation required to reach the necessary sensitivity. We describe the noise processes that wi ll influence the achievable precision with the SKA. We assume a long-term timing programme using the SKA1-MID array and consider the implications of modifications to the current desig n. We describe the possible benefits from observations using SKA1-LOW. Finally, we describe GW detection prospects with SKA1 and SKA2, and end with a description of the expectations of GW astronomy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99dba04c2e9f47ce4f39552e2eb2db959471c6c5

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Citations in the corpus

• Detecting high-frequency gravitational waves with microwave cavities (2021, background): “These include future ground-based [3–5] and space-based [6, 7] laser interferometers, atom interferometers [8–10], pulsar timing arrays [11, 12], and CMB observations [13, 14], as well as new types of astrophysical signatures [15].”
• Dark, cold, and noisy: constraining secluded hidden sectors with gravitational waves (2018, unknown): “697 [56] SKA 1000 5, 10, 20 years 14 days 100 ns 4 [68, 84] (assumptions)”
• The local nanohertz gravitational-wave landscape from supermassive black hole binaries (2017, methodology): “In making IPTA predictions, we did not include new telescopes which will come on line in the next 10 years, such as MeerKAT (Booth et al. 2009) and possibly SKA Phase 1 (Janssen et al. 2015).”
• Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “the most massive galaxies at z < 1 [144, 209].”
• On the maximal strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition and its gravitational wave signal (2018, background): “In the Figure we show explicitly the current and future sensitivities (see also [88]) of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) [89] and LIGO [90–92], as well as the projected sensitivities of LISA [93], the Einstein Telescope (ET) [94, 95], the Cosmic Explorer (CE) [96], and the Square Kilometre A”
• A Review of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Domain Walls (2017, background): “The sensitivities of EPTA and SKA are taken from [141,142].”
• Gravitational waves from a universe filled with primordial black holes (2020, background): “Covering 14 orders of magnitude, one can see that it intersects the detection bands of the Einstein Telescope (ET) [65], the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) [66, 67] and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) facility [68].”
• The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “In the future, it is expected that new facilities such asMeerKAT and the SquareKilometreArraywill increase the sensitivity of PTAs manifold through extensive pulsar searching and timing programs (e. g., Janssen et al. 2015).”
• Probing the pre-BBN universe with gravitational waves from cosmic strings (2018, background): “The shaded regions in this panel show the estimated sensitivity bands of SKA, LISA, DECIGO, ET, and CE as in previous figures.”