LIMITS ON THE STOCHASTIC GRAVITATIONAL WAVE BACKGROUND FROM THE NORTH AMERICAN NANOHERTZ OBSERVATORY FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903 (United States)
- Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 rue Universite, Montreal, QC H3A 2T8 (Canada)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 (Canada)
- Department of Physics, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042 (United States)
- Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology and X-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 662, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 (United States)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91106 (United States)
- Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 (United States)
- Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie, D-53121 Bonn (Germany)
- Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, University of Texas at Brownsville, Brownsville, TX 78520 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Franklin and Marshall College, P.O. Box 3003, Lancaster, PA 17604 (United States)
- Department of Physics, West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6315, Morgantown, WV 26505 (United States)
We present an analysis of high-precision pulsar timing data taken as part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) project. We have observed 17 pulsars for a span of roughly five years using the Green Bank and Arecibo radio telescopes. We analyze these data using standard pulsar timing models, with the addition of time-variable dispersion measure and frequency-variable pulse shape terms. Sub-microsecond timing residuals are obtained in nearly all cases, and the best rms timing residuals in this set are {approx}30-50 ns. We present methods for analyzing post-fit timing residuals for the presence of a gravitational wave signal with a specified spectral shape. These optimally take into account the timing fluctuation power removed by the model fit, and can be applied to either data from a single pulsar, or to a set of pulsars to detect a correlated signal. We apply these methods to our data set to set an upper limit on the strength of the nHz-frequency stochastic supermassive black hole gravitational wave background of h{sub c} (1 yr{sup -1}) < 7 Multiplication-Sign 10{sup -15} (95%). This result is dominated by the timing of the two best pulsars in the set, PSRs J1713+0747 and J1909-3744.
- OSTI ID:
- 22167279
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 762, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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