The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: The first search for gravitational waves with the MeerKAT radio telescope

Understand

Pulsar Timing Arrays search for nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves by regularly observing ensembles of millisecond pulsars over many years to look for correlated timing residuals.

• Recently the first evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave background has been presented by the major Arrays, with varying levels of significance ($\sim$2-4$\sigma$).
• In this paper we present the results of background searches with the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array.
• Although of limited duration (4.5 yr), the $\sim$ 250,000 arrival times with a median error of just $3 \mu$s on 83 pulsars make it very sensitive to spatial correlations.