Gravitational wave astronomy of single sources with a pulsar timing array

By Kejia Lee, N. Wex, M. Kramer, B. W. Stappers, Cees G. Bassa, G. Janssen, R. Karuppusamy, R. Smits. 2011

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The stability of radio millisecond pulsars as celestial clocks allows for the possibility to detect and study the properties of gravitational waves (GWs) when the received pulses are timed jointly in a ‘Pulsar Timing Array’ (PTA) experiment. Here, we investigate the potential of detecting the GW from individual binary black hole systems using PTAs and calculate the accuracy for determining the GW properties. This is done in a consistent analysis, which at the same time accounts for the measurement of the pulsar distances via the timing parallax. We find that, at low redshift, a PTA is able to detect the nano-hertz GW from super-massive black hole binary systems with masses of ∼108–1010 M⊙ less than ∼105 yrs before the final merger. Binaries with more than ∼103–104 yr before merger are effectively monochromatic GW, and those with less than ∼103–104 yr before merger may allow us to detect the evolution of binaries. For our findings, we derive an analytical expression to describe the accuracy of a pulsar distance measurement via timing parallax. We consider 5 yr of bi-weekly observations at a precision of 15 ns for close-by (∼0.5–1 kpc) pulsars. Timing 20 pulsars would allow us to detect a GW source with an amplitude larger than 5 × 10−17. We calculate the corresponding GW and binary orbital parameters and their measurement precision. The accuracy of measuring the binary orbital inclination angle, the sky position and the GW frequency is calculated as functions of the GW amplitude. We note that the ‘pulsar term’, which is commonly regarded as noise, is essential for obtaining an accurate measurement for the GW source location. We also show that utilizing the information encoded in the GW signal passing the Earth also increases the accuracy of pulsar distance measurements. If the GW is strong enough, one can achieve sub-parsec distance measurements for nearby pulsars with distance less than ∼0.5–1 kpc.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e73ce4aa41048f932f0282d8fcf09f59bb9fbecc

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Citations in the corpus

The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, background): “(4) For single SMBH binary sources, the sensitivity would scale as A √ NT C/σ (Lee et al. 2011), also strongly dependent on the timing precision.”
Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays (2015, background): “In some cases, it could also help to improve our measurement of the distance to the pulsars in the array (Lee et al. 2011).”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, background): “Source locations with arcminute precision or better should be measurable and other source properties can be studied in detail (Lee et al. 2011).”
The European Pulsar Timing Array and the Large European Array for Pulsars (2013, methodology): “Furthermore, in Lee et al (2011) we investigated the potential of detecting the GWs from individual binary black hole systems using PTAs and calculated the accuracy for determining the GW properties.”
The astrophysics of nanohertz gravitational waves (2018, background): “1a) will produce constraints on a system’s orbital parameters (Arzoumanian et al. 2014; Babak and Sesana 2012; Babak et al. 2016; Ellis 2013; Lee et al. 2011a; Taylor et al. 2016; Zhu et al. 2014), in much the same way as ground-based instruments can with stellar-mass binaries.”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits On An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (2015, background): “…stochastic GWB. Deviations from isotropy, however, such as from a small number of bright nearby sources, could result in individually resolvable systems (Lee et al. 2011), and an anisotropic distribution of power across the sky (Mingarelli et al. 2013; Taylor & Gair 2013; Gair et al. 2014).”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits on Continuous Gravitational Waves from Individual Supermassive Black Hole Binaries (2015, background): “…triggered a burst of activity in the development of search and parameter estimation algorithms for CGWs from circular SMBHBs (Sesana & Vecchio 2010; Lee et al. 2011; Babak & Sesana 2012; Ellis et al. 2012; Petiteau et al. 2013a; Taylor et al. 2014), and more recently led to the development of the…”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, background): “Precise distance measurements such as this will be important to PTAs in the future since these allow the use of the pulsar term in single-source GW detection, which is essential for accurately determining the source location (Lee et al. 2011).”
Searching for the Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I (2023, background): “While in addition, PTAs are also able to detect GWs from single SMBHB systems (e.g., Jenet et al. 2004; Sesana et al. 2009; Lee et al. 2011).”