The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release

Understand

The highly stable spin of neutron stars can be exploited for a variety of (astro-)physical investigations.

• In particular arrays of pulsars with rotational periods of the order of milliseconds can be used to detect correlated signals such as those caused by gravitational waves.
• Three such "Pulsar Timing Arrays" (PTAs) have been set up around the world over the past decades and collectively form the "International" PTA (IPTA).
• In this paper, we describe the first joint analysis of the data from the three regional PTAs, i.e.