2022-12-16 11:00  P5A-1/Online

Merging Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Detecting Gravitational Waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Prof. Sarah Vigeland


For more than a decade, pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) have been using millisecond pulsars to search for low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs). The dominant sources in this frequency range are supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs), which form in the mergers of massive galaxies. PTAs are sensitive to individual SMBHBs, as well as the stochastic background -- the gravitational wave “hum” produced by the sum of all SMBHBs. I will discuss PTA detection methods gravitational waves, and present recent results of searches for the stochastic background by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration and the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) collaboration.