Pulsars as gravitational wave detectors

Understand

Pulsar timing array projects are carrying out high precision observations of millisecond pulsars with the aim of detecting ultra-low frequency (~ 10^{-9} to 10^{-8} Hz) gravitational waves.

• We show how unambiguous detections of such waves can be obtained by identifying a signal that is correlated between the timing of different pulsars.
• Here we describe the ongoing observing projects, the expected sources of gravitational waves, the processing of the data and the implications of current results.