Gravitational wave
Using pulsar timing arrays

Pulsars are rapidly rotating stars. A pulsar emits beams of radio waves that, like lighthouse beams, sweep through the sky as the pulsar rotates. The signal from a pulsar can be detected by radio telescopes as a series of regularly spaced pulses, essentially like the ticks of a clock. GWs affect the time it takes the pulses to travel from the pulsar to a telescope on Earth. A pulsar timing array uses millisecond pulsars to seek out perturbations due to GWs in measurements of the time of arrival of pulses to a telescope, in other words, to look for deviations in the clock ticks. To detect GWs, pulsar timing arrays search for a distinct quadrupolar pattern of correlation and anti-correlation between the time of arrival of pulses from different pulsar pairs as a function of their angular separation in the sky. Although pulsar pulses travel through space for hundreds or thousands of years to reach us, pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to perturbations in their travel time of much less than a millionth of a second.

The most likely source of GWs to which pulsar timing arrays are sensitive are supermassive black hole binaries, which form from the collision of galaxies. In addition to individual binary systems, pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to a stochastic background of GWs made from the sum of GWs from many galaxy mergers. Other potential signal sources include cosmic strings and the primordial background of GWs from cosmic inflation.

Globally there are three active pulsar timing array projects. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves uses data collected by the Arecibo Radio Telescope and Green Bank Telescope. The Australian Parkes Pulsar Timing Array uses data from the Parkes radio-telescope. The European Pulsar Timing Array uses data from the four largest telescopes in Europe: the Lovell Telescope, the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, the Effelsberg Telescope and the Nancay Radio Telescope. These three groups also collaborate under the title of the International Pulsar Timing Array project.

In June 2023, NANOGrav published the 15-year data release, which contained the first evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave background. In particular, it included the first measurement of the Hellings-Downs curve, the tell-tale sign of the gravitational wave origin of the observed background.
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