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Gravitational Wave Astrophysics with Pulsar Timing Arrays pp 1–47Cite as

Introduction

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Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) are ripples of space-time travelling at the speed of light, originating from some of the most violent events in the Universe. In particular, they provide a new means of addressing open questions in astrophysics and fundamental physics and for studying black holes: from their formation, evolution and demographics, to the assembly history of galactic structures and the dynamical behaviour of gravitational fields in the strong non-linear regime. Specifically, GW observations through a network of radio pulsars used as ultra-stable clocks called a Pulsar Timing Array (PTA), cf. Estabrook and Wahlquist (1975), Sazhin (1978), and Detweiler (1979), currently represent the only direct observational avenue for the study of individual supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) systems in the ∼ 108–109 M ⊙ mass range, with orbital periods between \(\sim \) 1 month and a few years. Moreover, the incoherent superposition of the cosmic population of SMBHBs is expected to form a diffusive GW background, which has yet to be detected, cf. Hellings and Downs (1983), Rajagopal and Romani (1995), Wyithe and Loeb (2003), Sesana et al. (2004), Jaffe and Backer (2003), Jenet et al. (2006), Sesana et al. (2008), van Haasteren et al. (2011), and Demorest et al. (2013).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is called “trace-reversed since \(\bar{h}_{\mu }^{\mu } = -h\).

  2. 2.

    Now Dame (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS.

  3. 3.

    Note that the equivalent expression in Anholm et al. (2009), Eq. (9), has a sign error, as acknowledged by the authors, see the discussion of Eq. (29) in e.g. Book and Flanagan (2011).

  4. 4.

    Note that there is a sign typo in Anholm et al. (2009)’s appendix in the equation above C9 (it does not have a number). Equation (1.176) has the correct sign. This was first reported in Mingarelli et al. (2013).

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Mingarelli, C.M.F. (2016). Introduction. In: Gravitational Wave Astrophysics with Pulsar Timing Arrays. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18401-2_1

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