LIMITS ON THE STOCHASTIC GRAVITATIONAL WAVE BACKGROUND FROM THE NORTH AMERICAN NANOHERTZ OBSERVATORY FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

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 usin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2013-01, Vol.762 (2), p.1-25
Main Authors: Demorest, P B, Ferdman, R D, Gonzalez, M E, Nice, D, Ransom, S, Stairs, I H, Arzoumanian, Z, Brazier, A, BURKE-SPOLAOR, S, Chamberlin, S J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ACCURACY
ASTRONOMY
ASTROPHYSICS
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
BLACK HOLES
COSMOLOGY
DATA ANALYSIS
Dispersions
FLUCTUATIONS
GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTORS
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
MILLI HZ RANGE
Nanostructure
Optimization
PULSARS
PULSE SHAPERS
RADIO TELESCOPES
SIGNALS
Spectra
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
Stochasticity
Time measurements
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Summary: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 ~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 super(-1)) < 7 x 10 super(-15) (95%). This result is dominated by the timing of the two best pulsars in the set, PSRs J1713+0747 and J1909-3744.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/762/2/94