The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Observations and Timing of 68 Millisecond Pulsars

By G. Agazie, Md F. Alam, A. Anumarlapudi, A. Archibald, Z. Arzoumanian, P. Baker, L. Blecha, Victoria Bonidie, A. Brazier, P. Brook and 90 more. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2023

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We present observations and timing analyses of 68 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) comprising the 15 yr data set of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). NANOGrav is a pulsar timing array (PTA) experiment that is sensitive to low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs). This is NANOGrav’s fifth public data release, including both “narrowband” and “wideband” time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements and corresponding pulsar timing models. We have added 21 MSPs and extended our timing baselines by 3 yr, now spanning nearly 16 yr for some of our sources. The data were collected using the Arecibo Observatory, the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Large Array between frequencies of 327 MHz and 3 GHz, with most sources observed approximately monthly. A number of notable methodological and procedural changes were made compared to our previous data sets. These improve the overall quality of the TOA data set and are part of the transition to new pulsar timing and PTA analysis software packages. For the first time, our data products are accompanied by a full suite of software to reproduce data reduction, analysis, and results. Our timing models include a variety of newly detected astrometric and binary pulsar parameters, including several significant improvements to pulsar mass constraints. We find that the time series of 23 pulsars contain detectable levels of red noise, 10 of which are new measurements. In this data set, we find evidence for a stochastic GW background.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c53d58796422a3622cf9ae3c178ccc997f4e4644

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Citations in the corpus

The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Constraints on Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from the Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “The NANOGrav 15 yr data set shows that the common uncorrelated red-noise (CURN) signal discovered in Arzoumanian et al. (2020) persists with greater significance and is now detected in a larger number of pulsars (Agazie et al. 2023a, hereafter NG15gwb).”
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, methodology): “The SMBHB population is a direct byproduct of hierarchical structure formation, which is driven by galaxy mergers (e.g., Blumenthal et al. 1984).”