TUNA Lunch Talk:

Rutger van Haasteren

Leiden Observatory

Searching for gravitational-waves in current high-precision pulsar timing observations

March 18

12:10PM, Room 230, NRAO, Edgemont Road

Abstract:

Long-term high-precision timing of millisecond pulsars holds great promise for the detection of astrophysical gravitational waves. Sources like merging supermassive black-hole binaries in the inspiral phase can potentially be detected due to the delays the emitted gravitational-waves induce in the arrival times of the pulses. Aggressive pulsar timing campaigns with this exact goal have been ongoing for the past decade, which makes the present day an exciting time for pulsar timing science. Current datasets are reaching sensitivity levels where an actual detection is not out of the question. I will focus on the analysis of the current datasets, including how we model different sources, how we perform the searches, and what the expected results are for the current datasets